


Andromedids

by summerstorm



Category: American Idol RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Movie Fusion, Community: kradambigbang, Fantasy, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-07
Updated: 2010-08-07
Packaged: 2017-10-10 23:41:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/105734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerstorm/pseuds/summerstorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Look, you want the star or not?"<br/>There was a long pause and then Brad said curtly, "I'd love to see you try. But please keep in mind that holding a star captive is considered slavery." <br/>Adam frowned. "What?"<br/>Brad sighed loudly. "Okay. When you say star, what are you hoping to find?" <br/>"A—a celestial rock fallen from the skies, Brad."<br/>"That's ridiculous," Brad said.<br/>"I know," said Adam.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Andromedids

**Author's Note:**

> So, this thing! Yeah. This is—well, almost definitely not the story I had in mind when I decided to write a Stardust AU last August, but that was so long ago and I started writing it so long after it that I can't even remember what the original idea was like. At one point it was my NaNoWriMo project, and then I got most of the story done for au_bigbang and missed my posting date, and then kradambigbang came along, and here we are.
> 
> This would so never have gotten done without [annemaris](http://annemaris.livejournal.com)'s encouragement, and it would certainly be worse without [katayla](http://katayla.livejournal.com)'s and [acquiescence_](http://acquiescence-.livejournal.com)'s heroic last-minute beta work. And I think it was [fakeplasticsnow](http://fakeplasticsnow.livejournal.com) who came up with the title at some point last year in some fic discussion post or another at [idolmeta](http://idolmeta.livejournal.com). (I still don't understand why I didn't start writing this story until April.)
> 
> And check out [chosenfire28](http://chosenfire28.livejournal.com)'s awesome art [here](http://chosenfire28.livejournal.com/159761.html).

**PART I**

 

The minibus an assortment of cast and crew from Wicked was bumping out of the state in swayed, made a dirty, ugly noise, and abruptly swerved to a halt.

That was how one Adam Lambert came to be in the town of Le Mur, Iowa the night of the annual local bonfire while his on-again boyfriend at the time scribbled down speeches on old envelopes to let him down easy and for good. In context, Adam's on-again boyfriend's heart's desire would be the catalyst for the discovery and quest for his own. At the time, it was the most dreadful thing to top off months of self-questioning and demoralization—but we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's begin anew.

***

It was a cool night of summer in the Middle of Nowhere, Iowa, and, if you let your gaze follow the road for a while, take a turn over the dusty path on the right and climb the hill, there was a shimmer of nightlife, the sounds of those enjoying it only as loud as echoing footsteps from the spot where Adam was standing.

A bonfire glowed in the distance.

"'Til _morning_? Dude, this is so fucked up," somebody said within hearing range, and Adam sighed.

This was not his doing. He was traveling cross country with a show nobody would ever notice he was a part of, on the kind of bus that made public transportation look appealing, with a bunch of people every bit as awesome and jaded as he was. He didn't need to end up stranded in the middle of fucking nowhere to enjoy their company, and he definitely didn't need to be stranded in the middle of nowhere watching the locals burn things up on a hill like savages.

Bemusedly, Adam wondered if there were any particularly eye-assaulting items in the bus that he could afford to donate to their efforts.

It took less than ten minutes before Annie from the costume department sided up to him and said, "What're you lookin' at?"

Adam was, at this moment, on his way from barely buzzed to moderately high, and so he said bombastically, "The pinnacle of civilization."

Annie whistled until a few heads turned. "Guys, look up," she said. "We have a party to crash."

*

It wasn't so much crashing as walking politely into a field and being invited to sit on blankets and eat freakishly colored food for free, but it beat sleeping in a marooned bus or finding lodging for eight people at four in the morning in a town that, according to the sign they passed as they made their way up the dusty path on the right, called itself Le Mur, but in actuality had no borders for as long as the eye could see, and Adam had pretty damned good eyesight.

After a few introductions nobody was clearheaded enough to absorb, a girl with a sleeve tattoo stumbled into Adam, and Adam held her boob for a little too long entirely by accident, and then the girl invited him to join her and her friends on a blanket towards the highest point of the hill.

He sat down happily, and pulled out a joint as you would a bottle of wine when invited to a dinner party.

"So, fess up, dollface," the girl—Megan—said after taking a deep, long, seemingly satisfying drag, "did you really get stranded, or are you too 'cool'," said with air quotes and the utmost disdain, both well-deserved addenda to the word, "to admit you're just curious about the wall?"

"What wall?" Adam said, and Megan studied his expression with care.

"You're serious," she said, incredulous, and added, "_The_ wall. It's Le Mur's best and only claim to tourism. I thought you and your crew had crashed the bonfire just so you'd have somewhere to be through the night."

"That's pretty much what we did—"

"But you didn't even check!" Megan said. "There is nowhere, absolutely nowhere in town you could have found an empty bed, let alone a room, or—"

"Or even a haystack," her brother—"Stepbrother; his DNA has nothing to do with mine," Megan had said earlier, and her stepbrother had said, "And aren't we all lucky for that," and added, "Matt," and held his hand out for Adam—supplied.

"Half the people here are latecomers to the market. The other half are bonfiring because they rented out their beds to tourists," Megan said.

"Hey," Matt said, "bonfiring is a long-honored tradition among the people of Le Mur—"

"—which started because people looked at their own beds during tourist season and thought, 'Quick buck!'," Megan countered.

Matt opened his mouth to speak, then nodded lightly, conceding. After a beat, he said, "Let's not give a stranger a history lesson here, Megan."

"I think that's for the stranger to decide," Megan said.

Adam laughed. "Go ahead."

"The Wall," Megan began, magniloquent.

"The bane of our existence," Matt muttered, coughing.

"The main source of our savings," Megan said, raising her voice, and Matt held his hands up in the air apologetically, though the gesture seemed entirely void of sincerity. "For as long as anyone alive can remember, the wall has been there, and its entrance has been guarded by a man in a top hat and a dog in a basket. You don't piss off the man in the top hat and the dog in the basket. Nobody knows what happens if you do, because you just don't."

"Interesting," Adam said, amused.

"Riveting," said Matt sarcastically.

Megan rolled her eyes and proceeded. "And then, on the day of the market—which takes place once every seven years, and the date isn't clear until you feel it in the air, if you didn't know—he steps aside, and—"

"And lets all kinds of crazy people through," Matt interrupted, deadpan.

"Thanks, Matty," Megan said, then turned to Adam, drawing in air before breathing out, "but yeah, that's pretty much it."

"So what makes the market such a fascinating place to visit?" Adam asked, picking up a slice of blueberry pie from the middle of the blanket.

"It's magic," Megan said. "Things you could never find anywhere else—wishes and abilities and spells and truths—you can find in the market. It's pretty incredible to the foreign eye, even after you've seen it once, or more than that; I think you'd love it."

Adam nodded slowly, even though he wasn't sure what Megan was implying, whether it was all hyperbole or she truly meant one could trade in those sorts of things at the other side of the wall. He'd seen strange markets before, magically bizarre items spread over modest stands and passing hand to hand in the outskirts of various towns. He had a few friends who made some money off it and swore none of it was a trick, which Adam mostly believed, having acquired and successfully used a few of those objects in his lifetime.

It was all tangible, though, which spells and wishes were very much not.

He thought it better not to ask, and instead said, "It sounds amazing," because it truly did.

"It is amazing," Megan said. "Shame you have to leave tomorrow."

Adam chuckled. "Did I mention that?"

Matt threw an unreadable look at Megan, and Megan cleared her throat lightly. "Your bus broke down," she said, shrugging a little too casually. Adam chalked it up to whatever substances were coursing through her body and the fact that she seemed like a quirky girl, which Adam fully approved of. "I assumed."

"I do have to leave tomorrow," Adam conceded. "I'm surprised I hadn't heard of this before, though. Maybe I would have seen Le Mur as a destination, not an accidental refueling stop. No offense."

Megan shook it off and pursed her lips nonchalantly. "Maybe," she said.

*

Eventually, Adam's phone rang.

Adam was now very much in the moderately high zone, dancing barefoot with a tiny girl sporting a pink-streaked blond pixie cut and nursing a half-empty glass of fruity wine that looked unexpectedly right in her hand, here in Le Mur, Iowa, home to rocking dixie chicks and brothers on the verge of a sexual identity crisis.

On principle, Adam couldn't make the most of the latter, as he was attempting monogamy in hopes he'd soon have a reason to add it to his lifestyle in some sort of permanent way, so he was doing his best to enjoy the former.

And then his phone rang.

As he walked, he caught the back ends of stories about witches and enchanted places and magical candles; engaging outsiders in ridiculous tales told as though they were true must be a local past time.

Adam looked at the bonfire before smiling down at the display, and hoped the yellow twinge in his vision meant a late night call boded well for him.

*

"Hey," Adam said, excusing himself wordlessly to the tiny girl and shuffling over to a less crowded spot, not that one was hard to find. He sat down cross-legged on the grass and pressed his phone to his ear. The crescent moon was waning, shining weakly, and a few stars sprinkled light over the still dark sky.

"You sound far away," Brad said. "Where the fuck are you?"

"Le Mur, Iowa," Adam declared dreamily. "Very exciting."

There was a pause, and Adam could picture Brad exaggerating several blinks in slow succession so that the gesture would draw attention to his eyelashes. "You're shitting me," Brad finally said.

"I'm really not," Adam said, laughing raspy in his throat. "The bus broke down. We're stuck here for the night. And dawn, probably. Which means—" He took a deep breath and noted a particularly shiny star in the sky. As he did this, he realized his being stuck in Iowa over night meant he wouldn't get to see Brad between shows, which wasn't exactly a new thing, but it had maybe been a long time since they'd last seen each other, and Adam cursed under his breath.

He missed Brad.

"Which means you're not getting your ass over here before you check into your next hotel, got it," Brad said morosely. Adam wondered if he was sleep-deprived. Brad was adorable, in a snarky sort of way, when he didn't get enough sleep, but he sounded off somehow.

They weren't—they weren't _anything_ yet, really; they'd barely just met when Adam had decided doing Wicked again was better than struggling to make rent, and Adam had thought there was something special there, something worth not losing while he was tipping the balance of his bank account back up towards the black.

Half the time, Brad was eager and fun and wonderful, and Adam couldn't help but think that maybe how well and often they hung out and got along even when they _weren't_ having sex meant Brad might be someone Adam might like to call his boyfriend one day soon. The rest of the time, it struck Adam hard that that was a word Brad might not want to apply to himself at any point in the proximate future.

"Look, I'm not holding my virtue for you here," Brad said.

"I know," Adam said. "There's usually a talk involved before that happens. We haven't had a fucking chance to have that talk yet."

"But I don't want to _have_ that talk," Brad said. "You're busy with that bullshit touring the country playing a boring character for the sake of the mortgage thing, and I have shit to figure out. I don't have time to make sure I call you so we can pick up where we left off just because you want to salvage whatever fucking idea of permanency you insist on chasing after."

Adam frowned. "I'm not asking you to do anything," he said. His voice rose slightly as he went on, "You don't _have_ to call me. Fuck, Brad, if it's such a fucking chore you have to program alarms in your calendar to remember you _should_ talk to me, I can just call you myself."

"I don't think that's necessary," Brad said, cutting, and Adam's stomach leapt to his throat.

He hadn't known he felt so strongly about Brad before this.

He hadn't known stars flickered around like that in the sky—

—he hadn't known stars _moved_ like that unless they were falling, unless they were shooting fucking stars, and it was just wrong that this had to happen _now_, after Brad had decided to cut off the ties that just barely bound them, but Adam could still wish.

_Don't let this happen_, he whispered at the falling star. _Give me another chance_.

"A star is falling," he said into the phone, enthralled, watching the increasingly larger dot skirting through the skyline, down over the wall Megan had been talking about earlier, only to disappear in the distance, letting Adam notice the colors, the chatter—too far away to hear everything, but still, wasn't it a magic market? Maybe this was what that meant.

"That's a little fucking dramatic, don't you think?" Brad said, annoyed.

"No, I'm fucking serious," Adam said. "It fell at the other side of the wall. I wished on it."

"Are you stoned?"

"Not after this conversation, I'm not," Adam said.

"You're insane," Brad said. He sounded like he must be scrunching up his face in bafflement. "You should try to get it for me. Maybe I'll reconsider my stance on you if you're _that_ crazy. I like crazy people."

Adam stared at the field behind the wall some more, the multicolor smoke that seemed to be coming out of nowhere, almost like things were happening but he just couldn't see them.

The star could be there. The star could be there, beyond his sight, beckoning him to earn the right to be granted his wish.

"I will. I'll get the star for you," Adam said.

"You do that, I'll marry you in a white dress." There was a long pause, and Adam lowered the phone from his ear. "You're joking, right?" Brad's voice came from his hand, and Adam pressed the 'abort call' button.

Later, once the sun had come out and everyone he knew well—three understudies, half the make-up crew, Annie—was asleep on the hill, Adam shuffled over to the start of a long road down the hill, where Megan was packing up baskets into a beat-up old van painted the color of Irish fields.

"I think I'm staying for the market after all," he said. He was certain no one would be aware enough to miss him until some time after noon, and he wanted to try. It was crazy, but it was _something_. He needed to do something, and he was under the impression that most good things came out of decisions you didn't expect to work out—something like karma punishing you for being cocky, for making assumptions that weren't even supposed to come to mind.

Well, clearly one couldn't find a fallen star—it would have disintegrated through the atmosphere, the dust would have blown off, even if it truly remained whole it would be much too big to move from the spot, let alone _carry_—but maybe the market would give him something to show for his quest. Something to offer Brad, to make him believe Adam hadn't picked him as a vessel for some kind of impersonal desire to be in love; that he had simply picked _him_.

Megan looked surprised for about a minute, and then she grinned widely, almost like she knew something he couldn't even grasp at yet.

"We have a futon in the back," she said finally, slamming the driver's door shut. "It's all yours, baby."

*

He called Brad again before Matt woke up so they could get going.

"Tell me you're not still in Iowa," Brad said as way of greeting.

"I hitched a ride to the Wall."

"The—" There was a shuffling sound, like sheets being ruffled out of the way in order to get up. "Wait, you mean that's legit?"

Adam gritted his teeth. "Look, you want the star or not?"

There was a long pause and then Brad said curtly, "I'd love to see you try. But please keep in mind that holding a star captive is considered slavery."

Adam frowned. "What?"

Brad sighed loudly. "Okay. When you say star, what are you hoping to find?"

"A—a celestial rock fallen from the skies, Brad."

"That's ridiculous," Brad said.

"I know," said Adam.

"Do you have any idea what you're doing?" Brad said. He almost sounded like he knew something Adam didn't, which could easily be true—Adam was into astrology and may have liked to buy magical items in street markets, things that passed from hand to hand and nobody really knew who'd made them or where they'd come from, but Brad made a hobby out of studying borderline paranormal bullshit as though it _wasn't_.

It might not be, Adam thought. If he was doing this, he might as well take the cracked-out approach.

"No," Adam said, "but that's kind of the point," and then he saw Matt walking towards them and said, "I have to go," and hung up.

*

Adam's subconscious was painting the clearest picture of a moon crater he'd ever seen or imagined or would ever have the presence of mind to remember clearly when some kind of cruel bump on the road unsettled him to consciousness.

"Shit," he said, squinting around himself. Car. Van, actually. He was lying on something uncomfortable—a futon, he thought—and there was a ridiculous amount of seemingly useless crap surrounding him. He was surprised nothing had crushed him in his sleep, considering the bottled ship collection held on by tape overhead. Who the fuck lined up the top of a van with glass bottles?

He reached out to touch one of them, but was startled by a cough coming from the front seat.

"You forget where we're going?" the blond guy in the co-pilot seat asked, nothing but curiosity and maybe a bit of a amusement behind his words, and Adam blinked.

Yes, he almost said, he'd forgotten, could he please be reminded, but then he noticed the long locks of dirty blonde hair falling over the tattooed shoulder of the driver, and the previous night came rushing back.

The blond guy—Matt, Matt G-something, Adam still didn't plan on sleeping with him so it wasn't really wrong not to know his last name—chuckled and nodded, urging Adam's slow recovery of his memories along.

"The wall," Adam said, and the car hit another bump on the road. Looking up only revealed a few more trees than there had been back on the hill where he'd last closed his eyes. Adam assumed they'd just gone further into the forest, past civilized road pavement. "Fuck." He groaned, barely following Matt's movement as he hunched over himself and retrieved something from the glove compartment. The sun was beginning to shine, and usually Adam would be glad to see it, but this time the light pierced into his skull with sadistic viciousness.

"Here," Matt said, handing over a box of ibuprofen and a plastic cup with something clear inside. Adam smelled it; he got nothing. Matt snorted and said, "It's just water."

"That's what I was afraid of," Adam replied, but downed the pill anyway. It couldn't hurt, and he'd always had a knack for knowing whose help to accept and whose pills to get rid of surreptitiously. Besides, he'd been asleep in the back of the van for what felt like hours, and they hadn't even gone near him, except to lay a blue travel-sized blanket over him.

After a while, his eyes fixed on Megan's vest, and he said, "Is that Dolce &amp; Gabanna? And you drive a _van_?"

"She crashed her real car a couple towns back," Matt said.

Megan made a noncommittal huffing noise. "That truck came at me. Be happy you're still alive."

"You left your car there?" Adam gasped.

"I'm sure a good peasant will be pleased to find a lone BMW on the side of the road and take it to the repairman. Besides, I can't access my trust fund until I'm twenty-five. And cars are a liability where we're going."

Adam sighed. "Right. How long until you we get there?"

"By my estimates," Matt said, feigning pensiveness, "about half an hour. You still have time for another nap."

"Oh, thank god," Adam said, and went back to sleep.

*

Up close, the wall was, well, a wall. Stone and dirt, a beat-up old thing that didn't look particularly functional. Right where the road ended, the wall opened into a field. This entrance was guarded by an old man in a top hat, who didn't look menacing in the slightest until Adam's step fell ahead of Megan's and he was faced with twin deadly glares: one from the old man, and one from the old dog lying in a basket at his feet.

It softened as soon as the guard took in whose company Adam was in and chose to ignore him, turning to face Megan instead.

"Miss Megan, long time no see," the guard said with a gummy smile. "Business in the city going well?"

"Very," Megan said, "no thanks to the schmuck of my brother, but yes."

"Well, that explains your absence," the guard said, nodding towards Matt and stepping aside to let the three of them in.

"Business?" Adam asked Megan, raising a playful eyebrow.

"You'll see. The market opens in the morning," Megan said, hiking her skirt up to her knees and lifting a foot over the square rocks lining up the opening in the wall. Her lace-up boots were black and sturdy, completely at odds with the flimsiness of her ocher-themed outfit. "Come on."

*

It took Adam a long, long walk down the field behind the wall and a shorter, more mazy one through the path where sellers were setting shop for the magic market and up to a backdoor around an inn to realize no outsiders had been allowed in yet.

"We're not exactly customers," Matt said when Adam asked, and pulled out a set of keys.

"This is our dad's inn," Megan explained. "Well, one of them."

"Wait," Adam said, "is this what you meant when you said you got most of your savings here?"

Megan shrugged. "It holds up our entire bank accounts. Tiny omission."

"Tiny omission? You own a hotel somewhere you said can only be accessed by people like you and me once every seven years," said Adam, trying not to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

"I can't just tell strangers I have a business pass. Besides, who said I'm anything like you?" she said, and winked at him.

The baby boy face tattoed across her shoulder followed suit.

It crossed Adam's mind that he should be a little more weirded out than he was, but there was something about the place that sucked you in. They passed a short woman with elfish ears and Adam was reminded of tales he'd heard as a child, books he'd read, movies he'd watched and immersed himself in.

He could have been dreaming, but his surroundings were much too vivid to entertain that possibility for long. It was almost like the market wanted him to accept all of this straight away, didn't have the time to engage in explanations and discussions about the logistics or even physics of keeping a place like this off limits from researchers and scientists and press—Adam wondered why he'd never heard about it in a way that betrayed its actuality.

Either way, the experience seemed like one worth losing himself in.

"And I'm not a stranger?" he finally asked, confused.

Megan tilted her head. "Well—"

"You're a safe stranger," Matt said, finally locating the key he was looking for, opening the door, and gesturing for Adam and Megan to step in.

"How can you be sure? For all you know about me, I could be a serial killer."

"The blanket turned blue," Megan said. "It's actually silver, and turns blue if the person underneath has good intentions. If you were a serial killer, it would have turned red, and we would have dumped you on the side of the road. No big."

"That's," Adam said, debating between relief that wasn't what had happened and disbelief that they'd just trust a magical fucking _blanket_ to know if Adam was or wasn't going to kill them, "reassuring. That's real reassuring, guys."

"That's us," Matt said, and closed the door behind all of them, "and this is the Spellbound Magpie Inn, Main Street subdivision. The main office, where Megan and I are going, is through this corridor, and the restaurant—" He gestured towards a set of wooden steps leading into a hand-carved black door. "—is through that door. You should eat something."

*

Adam walked through the small café-like restaurant at the inn in silence, taking in his surroundings. The local dress code was rather eclectic, which he enjoyed, though he felt just this side of out of place in his dark jeans and glittery black t-shirt.

The place was cozy, though, inviting, and several people smiled up at him as he made his way towards one of the few empty tables near the front doors. Adam caught details that reminded him of prosthetics he'd had to wear for plays—a puppet-like square chin, a strangely shaped or colored beard here and there, a much too slim waistline, a kitten-like _tail_—but everybody seemed undoubtedly real and intelligent and capable.

He almost sat down but, at the first whiff of pancake batter being fried, he felt a wave of nausea and chose to slip out of the place and get some air instead.

*

Tourists were already trickling in, slow but steady, and Adam wandered aimlessly until he set eyes on a young redhead minding a stand full of barely opaque flowers and differently colored candles.

She seemed like his type of person, so he headed towards her.

"Hello," she said as soon as he stopped walking. "What can I do for you this fine morning?" Her voice was husky, and cheery in a way that sounded more resigned than genuinely happy to be where she was.

"You have a nice stand here," he said.

"Oh! Yeah, it's my master's," she said. "I just tend to customers. What is the purpose of your venturing into this land of ours? Love potions? Liquid luck? I'm afraid if you want liquid luck you're gonna have to check a little farther into the forest and a little later at night." She gestured for him to come closer, and he did. "It's kind of illegal."

He laughed. "Good to know."

"Glad to be of service," the girl shot right back. "Seriously, though, what can I help you out with? You want to be quick before Kar—I mean, before my Master comes out."

Adam wasn't sure if there was anybody who could help him find what he was looking for. He should rethink the purpose of this trip, buy something nice and go back home. Maybe he'd manage to squeeze in a second to talk to Brad about this whole pseudo break-up thing. After all, whatever the star turned out to be—whether it was light or heavy, perceptible or already vanished, mineral or some other kind of thing or creature—Adam would most likely not recognize it. What was the point of attempting something he knew he was going to fail at?

"I'm looking for a fallen star," Adam tried.

And as soon as the words came out of his mouth, he realized they were true.

The girl stared at him for a moment, and then something pulled at her and she turned around. A woman was standing on a set of steps that led into a caravan, holding a thin, silver chain in her hand and tugging lightly.

The woman ushered the red-haired girl into the caravan, but, before she left, the girl slipped something into Adam's hand—a small flower, the size of a button. She gave him a meaningful look, and he slid it into his pocket. It seemed important to her that he have it.

Then, the woman walked towards him until she was right behind the stand. She looked Adam up and down and said, "A star, huh?"

Adam pursed his lips, not sure whether he should confirm or deny. In the end, he did neither.

"You want to keep those on a tight leash, honey," she said, voice sickeningly sweet. "Tell you what. I'll make you a deal. I'll give you one of these enchanted chains, unbreakable." She picked up a knife and sliced the chain in half; as she'd predicted, the metal bound itself together instantly after. Adam had seen this before, in some seedy and some not so seedy places in LA. The BDSM community loved those things. "_And_ I'll throw in a Babylon candle. They're rare things, these candles—you light them and blow them off as you think of the place you'd like to be, or the thing you'd like to be next to, and you'll appear there instantly. No treading the land for a star that could be anywhere, or move around while you're too slow to catch it.

"In exchange, you'll give me fifteen days of your privacy. No more, no less. You won't feel watched, but I'll know where to find you."

"Why would you want to find me?"

"That's for me to decide," the woman said tartly. "Think of it as a reality show. You let me into your life for two weeks, and I'll choose what I want to focus on. Passive knowledge. You take this flower, put it in your pocket, and it dissolves—you won't even feel the tracking spell after that."

"But that's not like, a real thing, is it? I mean, that doesn't sound realistic," Adam said.

"That's for _you_ to decide, sweetheart," the woman said. "If I say no, you won't believe me. If I say yes, we're back to the start. This is how deals work for tourists: you take your chances."

Maybe it was due to the hangover or the sleep deprivation or the fact that he had no idea what he was doing in any other area of his search, but, whatever the reason, Adam said yes.

*

He got a chance to eat and sleep on the generosity of Megan and Matt, who took him to a smaller inn a little ways away from the market when they realized he had no tradable goods apart from the Babylon candle, which Matt assured him he would kill himself over if he gave it to them just like that. Adam then offered to sing for pancakes, and Megan said, "We'll think about it," and that was that.

And now, Adam was standing in front of a body-length mirror, fresh out of a long, hot bath, wondering what in the world had possessed him to do this without a place to stay or currency that was worth anything where he'd gone or even a proper change of clothes. He had a couple of clean shirts and pairs of underwear in his messenger bag, but he'd left most of his stuff in the minibus. He was missing every single cosmetic item that wasn't absolutely basic, and his phone didn't work when he tried it, and his means of transportation was, at the moment, a fucking _candle_.

He had no idea how he was going to handle something which entailed fuck knew what.

He had no idea why he was sure he'd handle it to begin with, but he was. He was doing this. He was blowing on a candle in the middle of the night and capturing a shooting star to bring back to Brad, who probably would want even less to do with him when he found out Adam had gone insane, or worse, had traveled through the kind of place Brad had been hoping to find for the longest time without inviting him.

Or it could be payback for Brad deciding to cut things off when Adam wasn't even around to convince him otherwise. It wasn't such a terrible thing to want, some kind of stable boyfriend, was it? Everybody seemed to have had something like that, and Adam wanted it too—wanted to feel some kind of—_something_, and that wouldn't happen if he never let anything with anyone grow beyond fun, meaningless sex. Not that Adam didn't like the sex—Adam was pretty sure he'd never get tired of that—but he _knew_ getting naked with someone must be even better with some kind of connection deeper than exchanging sweat on a dancefloor.

At the same time, he thought it wasn't something he should force, and maybe that was what the star was about—not knowing what he was going to find, there was no way to be disappointed. He would find _something_.

Adam lit the candle, and thought of Brad, and his misguided career, and whether Broadway was really everything he'd ever wanted.

Then, he pursed his lips near the flame, shaped them into an 'o', and thought only of the shooting star as he let a current of air from his lungs course through them.

*

The first thing Adam became aware of upon landing was the unstable position of his feet, and then he was stumbling forwards and effectively fucking up the skin on the inside of his wrists to keep from crushing the body lying beneath him.

The fuck—he was pretty fucking sure he wasn't supposed to end up on top of anybody just yet.

"I'm supposed to be looking at a star," Adam said, balancing his weight on his hands and looking around before propelling himself up to his feet.

"Um, hi," the guy said, and Adam glanced down at him unconsciously. That couldn't be a star. It was a _person_.

"You can't be a star," he blurted out.

"I don't think you know me well enough to say that for certain," the star said, dusting off his pants. It—he?—looked younger than Adam, though there was no way that was right, and he was wearing a light gray two-piece suit made out of ridiculously soft-looking fabric.

If he really were a star, he wouldn't be wearing any clothes. He wouldn't be a _he_, but even if he were, he wouldn't be wearing any clothes. Did stars wear clothes? Maybe Adam should have paid more attention to Brad's paranormal astronomy rants. Or, like, high-school Physics.

"Is this an illusion or something? Did I inhale candle fumes? Oh my God."

The star—or whatever it was—raised an eyebrow at him. "You have a lot of 'illusions' like me?"

Adam gave the star a once-over. It—he—looked like the kind of guy Adam wouldn't hesitate to approach if this were a bar and he were an actual _person_. "Stars are supposed to be inanimate objects."

"Oh, don't tell me you're one of those people," the star said. "I was hoping falling at this side of the wall would take care of that issue for me."

Adam held up his hands. "I'm sorry I'm not what you were expecting. I wasn't expecting this either."

"Actually, I wasn't expecting anything," the star said, and tried to stand. "Didn't expect any leg injuries either."

"You're a _star_," Adam remarked. "You can't possibly have a hurt _leg_."

The star huffed at him. "Hey, is that like that thing you said earlier, what was it—'you're a star, you can't possibly be a living creature'? Because I think we proved you wrong there already."

So Adam helped him to his feet, which was weird, because the star also felt and weighed and had the same angles as a person, and it was harder to think he was imagining it when it felt real in his arms and he was holding it and then letting go of it.

"You know, I've heard the same arguments a million times each," the star said quietly, taking a short step out of the strip of land he'd made a bed out of, "but somehow this one has already gotten boring."

"I'm still not sure you're not an illusion," Adam said. "This is so fucking bizarre."

"You think you made me up inside your head," the star sing-songed. "Interesting. Do I have a name inside your head?"

"You're supposed to be a rock I bring to my not-yet-a-boyfriend as a token of—whatever." The star waited for an explanation, so Adam added, "I don't name rocks, even when they've turned themselves into humanoid creatures."

"Humans name stars," the star said.

"Not ones that look like people," Adam countered. Then, he figured it would be a good idea to have something to address the star by that wasn't 'hey, you' or 'star,' so he said, "Do you _have_ a name?"

"No," the star said, imbuing the word with so much dry sarcasm Adam wondered for a second if the exaggerated tone was supposed to take it from obvious lie to so obviously a lie it must be the truth. Thankfully, the star followed it up by shaking his head and saying, "I'm Kris," which answered that question.

"Well, Kris," Adam said, "you're coming with me."

"I'm sorry?" Kris said, disbelieving. "You can't make me go anywhere without my consent."

"You got somewhere else to go?"

"Home," Kris said matter-of-factly.

Adam tilted his head. "Can you go home _now_?"

The previously borderline smug expression on Kris's face turned dark. "Not without a Babylon candle, no," he admitted, shuffling his feet.

Adam considered not telling him he had one—he might need it at some point, and he wasn't sure it was a good idea to give one away like that. He had a feeling they were pretty rare. Still, he had one, and it was really the only way Kris had to go back home, so he fished it out of his messenger bag and showed it to Kris.

It looked about thirty percent shorter than it had been when the woman at the stand had given it to him. "You think this would get you there?" Kris nodded slowly. "I'll give it to you if you come with me. I made a promise."

"I'm not an object," Kris said. "I'm not your I'm-sorry gift, man."

"You're a _star_. In the real world, you're supposed to be rock and fucking glitter and shit," Adam said, exasperated, and watched Kris grit his teeth like the motion would zip Adam's mouth shut as if by magic.

That reminded Adam of the enchanted chain he'd purchased at the market—and the fact that, considering the way the candle had worked, it was probable he was being watched on some level. He tried not to dwell on that, choosing to wrap one end of the soft, thin chain around Kris's wrist, and the other end around his own.

"Kinky," Kris said pointedly, and Adam looked up at him.

"You don't want to go down that road," he said, because the idea of tying this guy up for different purposes was appealing, and Adam wasn't about to entertain those thoughts about a star. Even if it didn't seem like it now, he was sure he'd live to regret it.

Kris looked down at the metallic tinge around his wrist and, surprisingly, didn't talk back.

*

The silence didn't last nearly as long as Adam was hoping for, by which Adam meant Kris started talking as soon as they'd climbed out of the crater Kris's fall had created in the ground.

Adam looked around himself, attempting to be casual about it, as though he was simply observing his surroundings instead of fucking lost in the middle of nowhere _again_, except this time there were no bonfires to guide his way or locals to entertain him.

Kris said, mellow, "Do you have any idea where we're going?"

"Yes," Adam snapped. "We're going home. Or at least back to the wall and out of fantasy land here."

Kris sighed, a barely perceptible sound. "Do you have any idea how to get there?"

"If you shut up for a second, I'll figure it out," Adam said. He meant it: he wasn't the kind of person who got lost. It wasn't pride; he just didn't have trouble knowing which way was north and east and west and south. The wall bordered the northern farmlands of Le Mur, so it followed that going south would take them there, or at least somewhat close.

Kris was holding back a chuckle at this point, and Adam allowed it because, well, he wasn't about to get into a fight with a star over a minor slip in his sense of direction. He was basing the way they'd take on the stars that remained in the sky, after all, and anyway, it was cute; Kris's face was all scrunched up and Adam felt himself relax a little, let out a breathy laugh of his own before he tugged softly at the chain and gestured towards a group of trees to their right.

Kris visibly relaxed, which Adam took as agreement regarding his choice of direction, and said, "Okay, then. Let's start walking."

*

It was nearly dawn, though the forest they were treading across was set on stretching the nighttime on a little longer, and Adam's boots already felt too tight for such a potentially long journey.

For his part, Kris just kept yawning irregularly, the frequency rising whenever they reached a clear patch of land that made the dim sunlight visible. Adam wasn't sure how much time Kris had spent lying on the ground before Adam had disrupted his solitude, but he guessed Kris had slept enough to be well-rested, and awake and aware for a lot longer than the couple of hours they'd spent walking through the forest so far.

Kris yawned again.

"If you fall asleep, I'm not carrying you," Adam warned preemptively. "I'll drag you all the way if I have to."

"You'd regret that," Kris said tiredly. "Dragging is way worse for the shoulders than carrying. Less distribution across the muscles." In what Adam was inclined to believe was an accident, Kris illustrated his point by stretching his arms behind his head. His jacket hugged his biceps snugly, and it took Adam a few seconds to realize he was staring and stop doing it.

He hoped it didn't break any sort of code to find the token of your love for someone else hot. It wasn't like Adam had had any other choices of stars. It was either Kris or coming back home empty-handed, and as far as Kris himself was concerned, it was either accepting his form as real for the time being or checking himself into a madhouse.

It _seemed_ real, at least. He was, like, ninety percent sure anyone in his position would see the same thing. Nothing about Kris felt like an illusion, even if Adam's mind insisted that was the only possible explanation.

If Brad was here, he'd have a better one. Maybe that was the point of this trip: capturing a star was much more a possibility Brad would jump to investigate than an endeavor Adam would randomly take on. This would bring him closer to understanding Brad, and Brad closer to appreciating what Adam had asked of him. Maybe destiny had a hand in it.

Adam had always liked the idea of destiny, romanticized when he was younger, a reassuring presence in the back of his mind as the years had gone by. He'd failed to rekindle his belief in God a handful of times, but the concept of destiny had consistently stuck through. Something bigger than him, something powerful and kind that helped and guided people through various subtle means—he needed that. In some ways, Adam thought everybody did, everybody could use believing in something bigger than them.

Half an hour later, Adam noticed Kris was dragging his feet.

A higher power was the only entity that could possibly be sadistic enough to have him encounter _this_ on his quest for a halfway serious relationship.

Then, something innocuous-sounding growled.

It took Adam by surprise, which was stupid because, star or not, illusion or not, Kris was in a person's body. "Was that your _stomach_?"

"Ah," Kris said, looking down curiously, "probably? The only times I've heard people make that noise was when they were hungry, so that's probably a good guess."

"You're a star," Adam said. It was just kind of hard to accept Kris as a real person. For good reason, Adam thought: Kris wasn't a real person. "You're, like, fucking magic. Can't you just click your fingers and stop being hungry?"

"You have a really strange concept of magic—"

"But you're not _really_ human," Adam said, trying to understand. "I'm inclined to believe you don't have the same needs as a human being, or you can solve them differently. Especially here in this—whatever this place is. It doesn't work like the real world. Your stomach shouldn't work like a real stomach."

"I don't know, man, I don't make the rules," Kris said with a shrug, hand on the back of his neck, lips exhaustedly trying to offer a smile. "I just know my knees have been trying to give for the last mile. I'm not used to daylight." His eyelids were drooping—he _was_ a star. Stars came out at night; it only followed that Kris would want to sleep while the sun was out. Adam had gone about this all wrong. He should have blown on the Babylon candle last night instead of wait until it was nearly dawn.

"Right," Adam acknowledged.

They could take a break. His own bones felt heavy, and he could use some food, and Kris was setting back their pace unbelievably. In fact, he'd sat down, back against a tree, legs stretching on the grassy ground, and he looked ready to sleep for days.

That wouldn't do, but Adam could give him a few hours. They couldn't possibly be too far from a village, or at least from someone who'd have some kind of vehicle to take them to one.

"Fine," Adam said, and unwrapped the metallic chain off his own wrist, stretching its length around Kris's middle and the wide trunk of the tree Kris had chosen as his pillow. Once it went around, the chain bound itself together, clasped tightly so Kris wouldn't escape.

"Is this something 'the real world' condones?" Kris asked, looking at the chain without any specific emotion in his voice or expression. "Slavery? 'Cause I was pretty sure that was abolished a good while ago."

Adam licked his teeth thoughtfully. "This is not slavery. I'm not making you do anything, and I'm paying you back for your time. I just don't want you to run away."

"Yeah," Kris said, laughing without any amusement, "Yeah, that's why masters chain their slaves."

"I'm going to get us food," Adam said, determined. "I'm paying you back for being my grand gesture. I'm giving you that Babylon candle. It's not slavery. I just know you'll flee without that chain keeping you put. And you're just going to sleep anyway; I'll be back before you wake up again."

Kris rolled his eyes up at Adam, a defiant look that hardly conveyed much at all in conjunction with his tiredness, and propped his weight up on his hands to find a more comfortable position.

As he made his way down the beaten path, something stirred in Adam's pocket, sent a tiny shiver, like an electrical current, down his thigh.

Adam chalked it up to sleep deprivation, and continued on his way.

His pocket stayed quiet.

*

The sunlight became progressively more and more overwhelming as the walls of trees retreated, allowing the path to twist and bend and, finally, when Adam was wondering if he'd taken a wrong turn, lead into a road that looked both functional and well-used.

He hadn't even had time to wonder how much longer it would be until he reached a village when the sound of wheels rolling over the pavement put a halt to his thoughts.

Looking to his left, he saw a caravan approaching. It was painted bottle green, though the coat of paint had thinned out so thoroughly it was nearly see-through where it hadn't simply slid off in flakes. It was pulled by two large goats, which ran faster than Adam would have expected any two goats to run, and it looked oddly familiar. He was certain he'd seen it before.

As it approached, he could also distinguish the dress and face of the driver, the sharp angles and seductive demeanor even when stumbling through an old, dirty road in a caravan that sorely needed some work, and Adam wondered how she could have possibly gotten here so fast from the market—if he might be closer to it than he'd thought.

He didn't have the presence of mind to step out and hold up a thumb in time to be seen and not run over, but the caravan stopped before him despite that.

"Well, look what your lack of privacy's good for," the woman said. "Need a ride?"

A loud, sharp cry ripped through the silence, and Adam noticed the caged parrot hanging from a corner of the hood.

"If you're offering a free one," Adam said cockily, tempting his luck.

"I'm a merchant, honey," the woman said, laughing. "My living depends on the state of my relationship with potential customers. Helping people is an investment. Just hop on."

Later, as the road descended and Adam could finally catch a glimpse of farms and houses and life, the woman slowed the caravan down to let a faster carriage pass and said, "You know, I never got your name."

If she wasn't bluffing about having taken his privacy, she must know his name already, but it never hurt to be civil. "Adam," he said, holding out his hand.

The woman held both reins in one hand and took it. "Kara," she said, and sped up down the road.

*

Kara took him to a tavern, bought them both a cup of cocoa and pastries, and then led him into a charming little grocery store where she loaded up on assorted produce for her travels and paid for bread and cheese and other edibles to feed the star she knew he was traveling with. Then, she offered to charm his messenger bag so its internal capacity was bigger than its external looks, and he held it open for her as she murmured a few words and fit every last box of food within.

It was a little too much, but Adam wasn't about to question her generosity. Dealing in intangible goods wasn't something Adam had seen much of: enchanted objects may not have been far from commonplace, and sometimes sellers used them to take memories or share knowledge in exchange for unique items, but he'd never involved himself in any such transaction, and he was unaware of what the guidelines for them were. For all he knew, allowing Kara to put a tracking spell on him was worth every bit of this lavishing treatment.

Before they got on the caravan again, she uncaged the bird and nodded her head at it until its shape became that of the sassy redhead who'd given him a flower at the market. "Five minutes," Kara said, and the girl nodded and began stretching, not directing a single word at him. Both she and Kara were entirely blasé about it, so Adam didn't push it; maybe it was a brand of servant protocol he wasn't familiar with, and he didn't want to offend Kara or make things bad for the girl.

Soon enough, they were on their way back to the forest. The sun was high in the sky, if also hidden by heavy dark clouds, and Adam's otherwise useless cellphone indicated noon had passed a while back.

By the time the caravan stopped at the path Adam had left behind, there was a light mist covering everything in view, and Adam found himself hoping Kris was all right.

As he leapt off the perch and onto his feet, he heard a tinny noise.

"What's that?" Kara said, face switching into annoyed worry. Adam thought it was the first time Kara had looked anything but completely sure of her place in the world.

"I don't—" Adam began, but the tinny sounds started up again. This time, they latched onto each other, forming something like a—chant, words. They weren't clear—they weren't even complete sentences, they might not even be English—but they were determined to deliver their message.

Adam left his bag on the ground and took a deep breath, closing his eyes. The soft draft got stronger, pushing his bangs to the side, causing his t-shirt to flap on his belly. The wind wanted him to go east instead of north to Kris—-the wind was pleading and urging him to follow its lead. The chanting was still untranslatable into words, but the meaning began to catch on: something about danger, rescuing, a star in peril, _find the star, save the star_—

When he looked up, Kara was waving a hand madly in front of him and asking, "What, what is it?" like it wasn't the first time she'd tried to get an answer from him.

He picked his bag up from the floor and said, "Kris is in danger. I have to—he's not where I left him. He's not where we went."

"Where is he then?" Kara said, sounding a little out of breath.

"As far east—" he said, and it felt like an echo. "As far east as the stars take to emerge—"

"What the hell is he doing east," Kara muttered, reining her goats to turn the caravan around, making the parrot screech in its cage. "Come on, I didn't sell you a fucking Babylon candle so you'd lose your star within a day," she urged, and he climbed onto the perch again.

*

The stars appeared into view when the sun was done setting and the sky had darkened. Just as Adam was watching three more of them pop up and cradle close to a constellation down south, Kara slowed the caravan down and pointed at the crossroads they were about to drive through.

"That's where he went?" Kara said, tone dripping with sarcasm and disbelief. "You'd think stars would be good at guiding themselves away from places with no history."

"No history as in—what?"

"That inn," Kara said, like it was obvious. "It was only spelled into existence hours ago. You don't go into an inn that was spelled into existence anything less than months before unless you want to die."

"Oh my fucking God," Adam said, "you're joking, right?"

"I don't joke about my Babylon candles going to waste, kid," Kara said, and the caravan stopped abruptly near the stable. Kara handed the reins to Adam while a young-looking, dark-haired boy ran towards them. "Get the goats settled in. I'm going to see what we're dealing with here," she ordered, and climbed off the caravan, picked the cage off the hood, and headed for the front door with it.

As a city boy, Adam didn't have the faintest idea what to do with goats. He tossed the reins at the kid as soon as he was within catching distance and said, "I—what do you do with these? Do whatever you do with these."

The kid nodded and unfastened the goats from the caravan, but he didn't seem much better at dealing with animals. He kept stumbling over the goats, and the goats wouldn't stop bleating wildly.

"I'm just going to get you guys under a roof before those ugly clouds start pouring rain, okay?" the boy told the animals desperately, walking into the stable as Adam hung his messenger bag across his shoulder and waited from afar.

A sliver of silver flashed through the narrow opening in the doors and, as the boy pushed them further apart to walk the goats in, Adam caught a glimpse of a slender, light-haired horse with a razor-edged white horn on its forehead and several heavy shackles holding it back to the wall.

A unicorn explained how Kris had gotten out of the enchanted chain, though not what was going on that had Kara so preoccupied.

Adam took a deep breath and dashed to the house.

*

Indoors, the inn was cozy and quiet.

Adam hadn't even realized he was cold until he'd walked in and been received by the warm glow of the candles scattered around the central staircase and the big fireplace presiding the small dining room to their side. To his left, the empty reception area gave way to a big room furnished like an old-fashioned bachelor's pad, except there were two people in it arguing with Kara.

One of them, a short man, rushed out to receive Adam. Adam said no to being helped with his 'luggage'—the messenger bag weighed even less after Kara's enchantment—, acquiring a room, and having a bath prepared for him, though he was tempted to accept that last one.

"Would you like something to drink? We have beer, tea, I believe there's a bottle of rum left somewhere behind the bar—" The man talked slow and clearly, like a radio host, but something about the way his mouth moved around the words was urgent, hurried, and his fingers wouldn't stop fidgeting.

So Adam said, "Some tea would be nice," just to put him out of his misery and be able to concentrate on his surroundings.

He glanced at the stairs. If Kris was here, he'd surely be on the first floor, and the inn was small enough that there wouldn't be too many rooms to look for him in.

Feeling somewhat queasy, he took the nearest armchair and accepted the cup of tea he'd agreed to, though it was too hot to drink from at the time, and so he set it on the table. Kara was just coming out of the room with a tiny, oldish woman, who smiled bright and welcoming but tired at him before holding her long skirt up and making her way up the stairs.

Then, the dining room was empty but for Kara and him, and Kara dragged a chair beside him and whispered, more a yell than anything else, her eyes wide and accusing and worried, "You didn't drink from that cup, did you?"

Adam frowned, then shook his head. "No," he said, "no, but I was going to."

"Well, don't," Kara said, patting Adam's forearm quickly. "You and I and your star, we're all in a bit of a pickle. I got a room for the two of us—don't look at me like that, it's an excuse to be upstairs. If we're not careful, they'll kill us."

"They really don't seem that—"

Kara snorted. "Yeah, that's what they want you to think. I used to be friends with Paula, you know," she said, and Adam assumed that was the petite lady from before. "She barely remembers me. It's the only spell I've ever managed to get past her barriers. She's powerful, and she's ruthless, and she has a powerful minion who won't question her choices, so, unless you want to carry a star corpse to your boyfriend, you need to follow my lead. And grab that tea. If it contains the kind of thing Ryan likes to poison his drinks with, it might come in handy. Here." She pulled a thin, empty vial out of her pocket and held it out for him. "Pour it in there. _Be careful_."

*

After making sure Adam wouldn't accidentally harm himself with the contents of the vial, Kara headed for the staircase and told Adam to follow in about a minute. "It works like this: if they think we're hiding something about ourselves," Kara said, "they won't think we've got anything planned against them."

And there was nothing and nobody in Adam's way as he walked to the first floor and met Kara at her door, which she'd already opened. She signaled towards a door to Adam's left, which was cracked open enough to get a quick glimpse into it.

"He's getting a massage," Adam said, feeling extremely underwhelmed by that turn of events. Not that he wanted Kris to be in the middle of some gory torture scene—his stomach probably wouldn't be capable of bearing that—but it seemed pretty anticlimactic until Kara rolled her eyes at him.

"And a knife through the heart if we're not quick enough," said Kara, just as Paula walked around the cot, and Adam caught a glimpse of metal behind her back, her hand reaching back to pull a dagger out of a deep pocket on her skirt. It glistened in the candlelight, and Adam held tightly onto the vial, as if he knew what to do with it.

Before Adam could take note of Kara's advance, he heard her voice within the room say steadily, "Do all your guests qualify for this treatment? Or just the ones who possess organs you can find an use for?"

Adam shifted slightly towards the door opening—he'd have to step in eventually, but he needed to assess what was going on first: Kara was a few feet away from Kris and Paula, which he'd expected, but Kris hadn't reacted to Kara's words, which was not a good sign—even if he'd lost his home in a freak accident, Adam felt Kris must hold his life in high enough regard to startle at the idea of losing it, which could only mean he was—not all that there. He could have simply dozed off, but even if his state had been caused by drugs, it wasn't necessarily cause for alarm. Paula must have given him something to make him pliable and easier to hurt, not to kill him.

Kara certainly seemed convinced not all hope was lost; Adam wasn't sure why she was concerned about the turnout of the situation, or about Kris's life, but she hadn't come off as someone who cared enough about anyone to pretend she cared any more than she didn't, so Adam trusted her gut on this. He had to.

A long, whooping whistle pulled him out of his head—Paula had taken on an air of superiority as she let it out, but it sounded a little too unaffected, like mocking Kara's involvement was hardly its only intended purpose.

"Stars, huh?" Paula said, voice teasing and even. "You're a merchant, right? That what merchants trade in now? Immortality?"

"Don't be ridiculous," Kara said, "I would never do what you're doing."

"Oh, yeah? And what is that?"

"Stepping in without plans," Kara said, "not realizing the full extent of the possibilities. Destroying a star like that, no rhyme or reason—"

Adam would have kept on listening, but he heard breathing behind him, and then there were hands around his throat, pressing in. "Fuck," he tried to get out, though only the consonants made it, and elbowed his attacker in the stomach as hard as he possibly could

The pressure let off as the guy staggered backwards, not hard enough to fall down but in an uncontrolled way that assured Adam he might not be completely useless in fighting him off. In an unprecedented fit of aggressive confidence, he surged forward and took the fist that wasn't wrapped around Kara's vial to Ryan's jaw.

That didn't cause as much of a setback to Ryan as he'd hoped, and instantly he found himself flat on his back on the floor, trying to push an actual _person_ off of him at the same time as dodge hit after hit. He was mostly successful at the last part—he sort of appreciated having his whole face—though there were a few jabs that got him sharply in the shoulder and, once, across the bottom of his neck, making it hard to breathe for a second.

Fortunately, that second was all Ryan needed to breathe easier himself, and the minimal decrease in his need to defend himself was all Adam needed to pull a knee up between their bodies and force Ryan's weight off his body, losing enough pressure to move his arms and haul and push Ryan off him.

Ryan braced himself against the wall this time, turning his head slowly and furiously in Adam's direction as Adam rose to his feet, and Adam realized this was it—he still had the vial, and this was actually _necessary_, a one-lives-one-dies kind of life-or-death decision, and one that affected not only him.

So he stood tall, faking determination, and ignored the churning of his stomach as he uncapped the vial in his hand and tossed its contents in the general direction of Ryan's chest.

Kara was right—it was poisonous, and it was powerful, and it froze Ryan's chest over and inside, extending over his neck and down his legs until little flakes of ice started coming off and Adam snapped out of it and stopped watching.

When Adam finally walked into the room, Kris was standing by the cot and had put on a fluffy robe and looked deeply confused.

Paula turned back and launched herself at Kris; at the same time, Kara threw herself at Paula, and they both went tumbling across the room as Adam tried to collect Kris and run out of the inn. Kara would take care of herself—she knew what she was doing, which was significantly more than Adam could say for himself.

She knocked a candle off the window sill, and the flame caught on a wooden chair set underneath, burning and stretching around the room so quickly Adam's eyes began to hurt. His heart had been hammering for a while, and at this point it was audible even as the flames ate up furniture and fabric, making a racket of crackling noise, even as Kara and Paula tried to drag themselves away from the fire by holding onto things and, in Kara's case, holding onto the other.

Adam grabbed Kris's wrist and tugged at it. Kris was picking his pants off the floor—his jacket and shirt had both burned down to ashes in the wicker basket that held the laundry by the window—and he stood to his feet shakily, dizzy.

That was when the beam over the door fell and blocked their only exit.

Paula got off the floor.

He held onto Kris and used his body as a shield as they stepped back, nearing the wall. They wouldn't get out like this. Kara was groaning, trying to stand fast enough to avoid the flames fast approaching, and Paula was making her way towards them, pushing the cot aside to be consumed by the fire.

Holding her dagger so tightly her knuckles whitened, Paula said between her teeth, "Give me the star."

"Yeah, that's not going to happen," Adam said. He wasn't about to crawl over and beg. If he had to go, he'd go with some semblance of dignity left. He'd already taken Ryan down. He'd caused damage to the person who was trying to cause damage to an innocent star, and that was—just. It was good. It was good if that was what had needed to be done.

"Give me the star and I will make the fire go away. Just hand him over and everything will be okay. We'll all be safe. If you give me the star, I'll say those few magic words that make bad things go away."

"No you won't," Kara said suddenly from behind her, raising her hand and doing something with her fingers that had Paula floating into the air.

"What are you doing?" Paula blurted out.

"What I should have done ages ago," she said, and, to Adam, "_Run_."

"You're letting them _escape_?" Paula said, astounded by that decision.

"Run—run how?" Adam began, and then he remembered he had a Babylon candle, and fire all around him to light it up.

He found it with some difficulty, rummaging in his bag without looking, transfixed by the way Kara was making Paula's arms cross and twist behind her back, the way Paula was simultaneously screaming in pain and claiming the star was rightfully her possession.

He closed his eyes. He couldn't concentrate while he watched someone be tortured, even if Paula had been trying to kill Kris seconds ago.

"Hold on," he told Kris, and Kris did.

Adam thought about getting out of there, and about silent, dry, empty places, gray stone and shiny floors, and how potentially dangerous it was that he had believed he'd be the only one who'd seen the star fall and thought to capture it, and whether this was it or there were more people looking for Kris and hoping to do him harm, and if they could dodge these people or they'd keep showing up out of nowhere and Kris and he wouldn't luck out next time, wouldn't be able to get out without knowing what exactly these people were and how to defeat them, and where in the world he could find a proper map—

"We're about to burn to a _crisp_," Kris shouted over the roar of the fire, and put the wick off in his second breath.

***

 

**PART II**

 

Babylon candles are curious, tricky things: they operate on thoughts, and thoughts operate in starts and stops, rushing and intersecting concepts that sometimes add up easily and sometimes cancel each other out, giving Babylon candles a real mathematical problem to solve in the .003 seconds the halogenic substances running within them measure and transport their possessor.

Sometimes, Babylon candles get confused.

Sometimes, Babylon candles take leaps of faith and hope for the best.

***

The concept of making mistakes, or even that of a mistake itself, wasn't new to Kris in the slightest. Illuminating the sky and guiding earthly creatures fulfilled him well enough, but those long hours in the night weren't always filled to the brim with riveting work, exactly, and even when they were, there was a lot of watching involved. Sometimes Kris looked over stake-outs, and, on a couple of special occasions, over stake-outs set on stake-outs, which created an interesting feedback loop, he always felt. So sometimes he watched over somebody watching over somebody else, and sometimes he just watched: life, emotions, small moments, always looking for the time where he would help someone stay away from going off the deep end, or ruining a relationship that made them or would make them happy, or avoiding major slips—swapping fat lies for white ones, life-altering decisions for mind-changing delays, and big mistakes for tiny ones.

Even then, Kris wasn't entirely sure where on that scale he could place whatever Adam had done to land the two of them inside a deserted building that looked a lot like a library. Kris wouldn't have pegged Adam for the kind of person who had books in mind with any sort of frequency, that was for freaking sure.

"Where the hell are we?" Adam grunted, mostly to himself, and Kris interpreted it as confirming his previous observation.

"A library," Kris said, "I think. Is this where you told the candle to take us?"

Adam gave him a long, long look. "No," he said slowly. "Trust me."

"What were you thinking about?"

"I don't _know_," Adam snapped. "Safety, and how apparently you have people looking for you all over the fucking place, and—" He paused, drawing in air and looking around.

Kris waited, and waited, and waited some more. "And what?"

"I thought I could use a map," Adam said, and his gaze settled on a shelf. It was marked by a bronze plaque bearing the word CARTOGRAPHY.

"Well, man, you got it," Kris said, choosing to laugh rather than curse their situation. "Go nuts."

Adam didn't acknowledge Kris's words right away; instead, he took in their surroundings. Every single bookshelf seemed carved by hand—no two of them were exactly the same, which gave the large, stale room a feeling of life and movement. While Adam observed his way out of his trance, Kris headed over to the opposite end of the room and opened a few windows, bringing air in. The sky was dark, but the town they'd wound up in was brightly moonlit. The window offered a view of several short streets culminating in a long air harbor. The silence was a little eerie, but Kris wouldn't expect anything else during market week; in Kris's experience the fact that there were a handful of people roaming the streets and two taverns near the harbor had not only their lights on but also constant customers going in and out was much more unusual.

Still, the large vessel stationed in the harbor explained that.

"Is that a ship?" Adam said. Kris didn't say anything; it was obvious enough that it was a ship. What else could it be? "Is it _floating_?"

Kris frowned and turned to Adam. "How else do you expect their crew to catch good lightning?"

"I don't," Adam said, and Kris offered an apologetic shrug.

"Forgot you were a tourist for a minute there," he said.

"This place is deserted," Adam said, voice soft. "I have a feeling no one would kick us out if we stayed here a couple days."

Kris snorted. "Out of a library? Market week? Not likely."

Adam sighed. "Good," he said, and stepped away from the window. "I'm going to go find some place to sleep."

"I hope you still plan on finding the map you brought us here for," Kris called after him.

In response, Adam only lifted a hand. Acknowledgment. Nice, but also thoroughly useless.

Kris rolled his eyes at nothing in particular and stretched his shoulders. He felt awake and a little wired and he needed clothes: he didn't mind wearing a bathrobe while he was holed up in a library with a guy who'd basically kidnapped him and then saved him and forgot to check or ask if Kris would, were he to stop watching at all times, flee again now that he'd done away with the chain Adam had put him in, but they'd have to leave the building eventually, and Kris had just realized the hard way that being conspicuous was not the way to go. He needed to pass for a real human being.

He found matches to light the candle lamps scattered throughout the library in Adam's messenger bag, which Adam had left on a bench between the cartography and geology sections, and set off to explore the building.

*

Two stories beneath the one they'd appeared in, Kris found a storage area with a lost and found section containing several items of clothing that Kris wouldn't have expected anybody in their right mind to be able to lose, but he wasn't about to look such a useful gift horse in the mouth when he could simply grab a few and then go back to the third floor, choose a few cartography books, and lay them all out for Adam to find after dawn.

He fell asleep on an armchair when the sun was just beginning to rise, eyes tired from reading golden letters on dark leather-bound tomes, arms and thighs sore from standing on his tiptoes to reach those books on high shelves.

*

The sunlight was beaming into the building when Kris opened his eyes. It took him a second to place himself, and a few more minutes to pinpoint that the crackling, stinging sensation his conscious was absorbing and rejecting came from the back of his neck and, in a slightly less painful way, from his lower back.

Maybe Kris needed to consider sleeping in more comfortable positions than halfway sitting up. There was a reason most humans didn't seem fond of that particular experience.

When he managed to open his eyes all the way, Adam was leaning over one of the desks fastened to the wall opposite the windows, snacking on cheese and holding a pencil behind his ear and a pen in his hand.

Kris tried to say good morning, but his throat wasn't cooperating, so he coughed a few times instead. Adam turned around immediately.

"Hey," he said, and Kris yawned at him. "You want some food? Feel free to go back to sleep, too—we're not leaving here until I'm done copying this."

"You could just get some runes, you know," Kris rasped out.

Adam looked confused for a moment, and then realization washed over his face—maybe he'd seen runes mentioned in one of those books before Kris had woken up. Or maybe that witch who'd helped save Kris from Paula had told him about it. Either way, what Adam said was, "Where?" and Kris could admit he had a point, so he stood up to fill his aching stomach, picked up a book on transitioning from stardom to Earth, though he highly doubted there'd be anything useful there, and let Adam work in peace.

*

He let Adam work on his copy of the map for about two hours. Adam was taking pointers from several different books, and when Kris had subtly looked over Adam's shoulder some time before, he'd seen a map in a format unlike any of the books Adam was using for reference. It explained why Adam hadn't simply ripped the pages out—the maps from this land were different from what he was used to.

"What does your person want a star for?" Kris asked, breaking the silence. The book he'd picked up was ridiculous: it was generic and out of date and it spent four hundred pages glorifying the dishonorable art of acquiring and preparing stars' hearts for various uses, from stretching their fountain of youth qualities to adding a nice taste to your love potion.

This wasn't new to Kris—he'd never strayed from home, but he'd seen what happened to stars who were dazed and out of it after their fall and happened to be picked up by witches or merchants or creatures who'd been waiting for a star to drop into their laps for decades and were ready to slay them into pieces, completely ignorant—or willfully ignoring—that stars were sapient and sentient. That stars also hurt.

Adam wasn't trying to harm him, and Kris was fairly certain, for something he didn't have any proof of, that Adam would have let Kris explain those things to him even if he'd been looking to procure the heart of a star.

"My person?" Adam echoed, tone halfway between annoyed and distracted.

"Well, he's not your friend, and he's not your boyfriend, and he's not—that's not the point," Kris concluded. "What does he want a star for?"

Adam took a deep breath, paper rustling where Kris couldn't see, and then he turned to face Kris and leaned back with his hands on the desk. He chuckled breathily and, with a shrug, said, "He doesn't," like Kris was supposed to have inferred that from—from what? From the way he used a Babylon candle to reach his destination? The way he'd _chained_ Kris to himself so Kris wouldn't run away, risked his life to save him? None of those things suggested Adam didn't care about getting the star to his person.

He told Adam as much, and Adam said dismissively, "Look, it's a grand gesture. I'm already here, aren't I? It would be stupid not to go through with it now," and went back to his map.

The map was a good thing for both of them, so Kris pulled back and went looking for a bathroom to hold himself back from pushing the issue.

Even after he'd calmed down, what Kris had tried to say was still the kind of thing he would have, as a star, tried his best to make someone in a bad romantic situation process. He would have left hints, made sure they didn't forget why it was hard to deal with their person sometimes, why they felt better when their person wasn't around to make them feel anxious and insecure without even trying, just by virtue of, deep down, not caring enough, staying put because they didn't want to risk causing someone pain face to face.

He couldn't make Adam understand any of that, though, because he'd fallen, and now the only one he could guide was himself.

"You know materialism isn't conducive to healthy relationships, right?" Kris blurted out.

And he was crap at guiding himself.

It wasn't exactly the best timing, and nothing had led up to it, but since the words had already left his mouth, he figured he might as well elaborate on that point. "You can't sustain a relationship on, on going on a quest for—for a myth, I mean, to you, I was pretty much a myth before this, right? You can't go on quests for myths every time you hit a rut or your person decides you shouldn't be together anymore. You can't sustain a relationship on waiting for symbols to fall into your hands so you can, what, back up how desperately in love you are?"

"I'm not even—" Adam began, then changed the course of his rebuttal.

"I have a point here," Kris said. "Which is, just because you can't bear the thought—and you can bear it, believe me, humans are way stronger than they think they are when they're facing a break-up—just because you don't like the idea of ending your relationship, that won't make your person any more likely to love you back. Investing in it like this gets you a transaction, not a relationship."

"How can you pretend you know what you're talking about like that?" Adam said. "You've been here for like three fucking days and you're not even a real per—"

"I'm a star," Kris interrupted, rolling his eyes. "For centuries, I've been guiding people out of situations exactly like yours. Leaping into things is all well and good until you realize it's too late to dodge the heartbreak."

"I'm not dodging anything," Adam said. "This is a grand gesture. I'm allowed one grand gesture in my whole fucking life, okay? And I know better than you do if it will fucking work."

Kris bit his lip to keep from yelling back and let out a loud sigh. "From what you've told me, he's clearly not interested," he said, quiet, "or at least not as interested as you are. That's not always a bad thing, but going to these lengths to pretend that's not true? That never ends well, no matter how many interferences and external help you get. It just doesn't work."

"This is the most pointless conversation I've had in years," Adam said. Kris thought that was supposed to imply it was extremely pointless, but Kris had no way of knowing how smart Adam's acquaintances were, so, as an insult, it fell pretty flat.

"I was trying to give you some advice," Kris said, voice all out of energy. "You look like you need it."

"I look like shit," Adam muttered, "big difference," and turned his back on Kris.

After a while, Adam took a break to eat, and he forced a smile or two at Kris, like he was asking for an unspoken truce.

Kris sighed and sat down next to him, wordlessly allowing it.

*

"So that woman from the—that woman who helped us escape, who was that?" Kris asked after a nap, when the sun was beginning to set, careful not to pry too obviously. Kris was sure Adam had never been in Faerie before, and it just didn't make sense that he'd know a local well enough to travel with her.

"She was at the market," Adam said, still focused on the traces of the pencil in his hand. "She gave me the Babylon candle, and that enchanted chain you lost somewhere in the mists of time—"

Kris ignored the reproach, because honestly, he wasn't about to apologize for letting a unicorn get rid of something that bound him to Adam in a way Kris hadn't chosen to be bound to anything but his home, and asked, suspicious, "For free?"

"In exchange for a few days of my privacy. She put a tracking spell on me," Adam said dismissively, but something about his voice implied he wasn't all that happy about that, or entirely aware of what it entailed.

It explained how that woman could have been there when Adam had needed a ride, and her ability to pull off a spell of that caliber was probably the same ability she'd used to sense danger when they'd reached the inn. That was all Kris thought he could get out of Adam, so he didn't ask any more questions.

In Kris's experience, however, tracking spells were never just that: nobody ever wanted just the experience of living vicariously through somebody else, especially when that somebody else was a random customer they'd never seen before, someone who didn't have a public image worth the trouble of messing with. Those spells generally used the people they'd been placed upon as patsies to get somewhere or find something or learn the whereabouts of someone who'd hidden for good reason.

That woman—she'd given Adam a Babylon candle to reach a star, an enchanted chain so the star wouldn't get away, and was following him as he traveled across Faerie in the company of that star. Kris didn't consider himself self-centered—you couldn't be, having been what he was for so long—but he'd nearly been killed a mere two days before, and someone like that woman—a merchant, a witch, someone who'd been through a lot and wanted to be through even more—couldn't possibly want anything from Adam himself, but she could use the heart of a star.

It just didn't make sense that she hadn't taken the chance to seize Kris at the inn, that she hadn't let Paula go through with her plan and only killed her afterwards, instead of letting Kris and Adam get away. Enchanted chains were cheap things, but Babylon candles were special—few people had one, and those who did saved and cherished them. They didn't give them away for the sake of measly voyeurism, let alone to help a stranger achieve an unnecessary goal. _Nobody_ was that stupid, and the way Adam seemed to feel about the tracking spell let Kris know he was right to suspect something.

With the intention of talking about it, he looked at Adam, who was shadowing the shape of a mountain on a sheet of paper, and realized he didn't know how to communicate something that sounded, even in his mind, like a conspiracy theory without sparking another fight.

Kris wasn't in the mood for fighting.

"So, just to be sure," Kris said instead, "you know if you need directions, you could just ask me, right? I still have a decent sense of place. It's sort of ingrained in my soul."

"Yeah, I would do that," Adam said, "only then I'd have to double-check, so it would be a waste of time."

"I wouldn't actually lead you awry, you know," Kris said, rolling his eyes, "there are more people after me than after you, and I wouldn't know how to find someone who's only after you and not aft—"

"That's not the point," Adam said dismissively, and Kris let out a small, breathy groan of frustration as Adam changed the subject entirely. "Hey, you're not limping," Adam said. "Did your leg magically get better or something?"

Kris looked down and wriggled his toes. "Oh. Yeah. The—lady at the inn," he tried, not entirely sure how to refer to her; calling her by her first name seemed wrongly forgiving, and calling her a witch felt too reminiscent of the potential problems Adam was clearly set on not talking about. Kris had no particular interest in forcing him. "She had this... paste, it mended the bones. It feels like it never broke." One good thing he'd gotten out of that mistake, though he wasn't about to admit he'd made one, not to Adam, not right now. Besides, he couldn't have known that woman wanted to kill him. Witches always planned and prepared against those things.

Adam blinked nearly imperceptibly and asked, "Why would she do that?"

"That would be addressing the big scary elephant in the room," Kris said.

"Address it," Adam said, words sharp, looking like something was just dawning on him but it wasn't quite there yet, and he wasn't sure if he wanted the full realization to come to mind. Still, he asked, "Why did she do that?"

Kris had always thought knowledge was the best way to combat everything, including the fear of it, so he only let out a long, warning sigh before he spoke. Adam didn't buckle. "Stars are—well, our hearts are more powerful when we're healthy. Healthy and happy. A witch can't just insert joy into someone, but they can erase their ailments. So she cured my leg. It was like, I don't know, an investment, except then the stock market pretty much crashed on her when you and your shifty benefactress came in."

"Okay," Adam said, but there was an edge of concern to his dismissive, I-can't-believe-this-is-happening-to-me tone, and Kris wondered if this was really news to him, and what was going through his head for his expression to turn wary so suddenly. "I finished the map," he said, cutting through the silence in a way Kris was both grateful for and vaguely taken aback by. "We can go whenever you're ready. Like, first thing in the morning."

"You do realize I'm still jet-lagged, right?" Kris pointed out. "I woke up thirty minutes ago."

"So you'd rather go now? I think waiting for the sunlight might be a better route than traveling cross country in the dark."

Kris shook his head. "No, but I'm going to be tired tomorrow morning. I can't go to sleep again right now. And—" He paused, walking towards the window. There was a bit of a crowd around the dock, like a crew had taken that night off to go out and mingle. "Maybe we could find someone to take us back to the market among all those people. That's not a passenger ship, but I think I know who the captain is, and I think she'd take us if we play our cards right."

In all honesty, Kris thought the captain might take Adam, because Kris had guided her through the beginning of her sailing, when she'd taken over the ship without even meaning to, and there was something about Adam that reminded Kris of her.

"You think she's at the bar with her crew?"

Kris thought she was, because she liked to oversee things from the inside, make sure her crew didn't get out of hand and have a little fun herself every now and then. She had to be a little ruthless to make her living the way she did, and she'd grown somewhat jaded over the years, but she must have been on shore for days and she was celebrating: it wouldn't hurt to try.

"Like, as opposed to all those other pirates who would kill us if we so much as talked to them?" Adam asked after Kris voiced his thoughts.

"Pretty much," Kris said.

Adam sighed. "Well," he said, "I could definitely use a drink."

*

If Kris wasn't seeing things, Adam's mood picked up considerably when he walked out into the dim, dim sunlight, messenger bag over his shoulder and map stored in a parchment case set across his back. His hair looked damp—Kris suspected he'd used mineral water and whatever products he'd had at hand to wash it—and he'd tossed on a shiny gray jacket Kris hadn't seen before.

If she didn't kick them out on sight, Kris was sure it would only endear them to the captain.

"Does she have a name? You know, other than 'the captain,'" Adam asked as they walked down the long main road.

Warily, Kris said, "Why?"

"No better way to break the ice than make someone feel famous," Adam said.

Kris laughed. "That's not going to work on her."

"It works on nearly everyone," said Adam.

"Trust me, if you do that, it _will_ backfire—"

"Even if it backfires, the ice will still be broken," Adam interrupted. "I know what I'm doing."

"—and we'll be looking at days upon days of hiking again," Kris finished. "And I don't think you do."

"I'm generally better with people than I've been with you," Adam said, halfway between defensive and apologetic.

By instinct, Kris approached the defensive part. "Right, because I'm a star."

Adam frowned fractionally and opened his mouth—to deny it, Kris assumed—but then thought better of it and said, "Yeah."

"Fine," Kris said, and filled Adam in.

*

The crew, the locals and various scantily clad ladies Kris suspected were prostitutes had in their majority congregated in a tavern by the name of "MacRory's," since it was not only the nearest to the harbor but also the only one that had opened daily since the beginning of the market, and therefore seemed to have acquired the temporary favor of temporary patrons and those interested in their pursuits and relations.

The captain was recognizable by her posture; the spot she'd taken on the one round table of three small ones set on a foot-higher platform across the bar, overlooking everything; the utterly disdainful expression on her face; and the fact that Kris already knew what she looked like.

They plowed through the sweaty crowd and the chairs and tables sprawled all around the room from mixing and matching and shifting around. Kris had come up with an opening line as they'd made their way down to the harbor—he was planning to ask for a seat somewhere they wouldn't get accidentally mobbed or mauled or spilled beer upon—and was wondering how close to the captain he should be before uttering the words when Adam picked up his pace and stepped in.

"Captain Rounds!" Adam said cheerfully, not even allowing Kris a chance to react, arms open invitingly as though he was just meeting a friend for the first time in years or perhaps so amazed at his luck he couldn't help but flail his arms around like a seal. Kris thought that was the sort of thing some people found embarrassing, but, after watching Adam mutter and groan and glower for some time, it was good to know he was capable of forming a real-looking smile.

The captain was looking elsewhere, and they had to wait a beat before she acknowledged Adam's words. She raised her chin slowly, wary, and the way she turned to the source of the voice that had interrupted her thoughts was almost as defiant as the look on her face when she quickly inspected the both of them, eyes darting down and back up and settling into a position of mistrust.

"How do you know my name, boy?" she said, narrowing her eyes as Adam flashed her a grin and his mouth moved to speak.

Sounding like he truly believed his own words, which Kris took note of in his head as a potentially useful trait, Adam said, "Your reputation precedes you," even though Captain Rounds's reputation was nothing to write home about, unless you liked writing home about technical flawlessness and commercial success.

Kris was really proud of the work he'd done for her.

"What reputation?" Captain Rounds said sternly, and Kris wondered if this was where they got kicked out of the bar by a mob of drunk air sailors. Then, she cracked an amused smile. "Stop lying to me and take a seat. I can smell your foreignness from a mile afar." She gestured for her only current companion to drag in an extra chair for Kris. It was an olive-skinned man with a sober semblance, though the shadows under his eyes and the way he only raised his eyebrows in acknowledgment at Kris and Adam, like saying words might pain him, suggested abstinence wasn't the norm for him.

Kris thought it might be the captain's first mate, who might be trying to avoid a hangover because the ship would part soon, perhaps first thing in the morning.

Before Kris's body had even brushed his seat, a waitress had been alerted to the captain's company and was swinging in with two large glasses of beer, setting them on the unusually clean table before Adam and Kris as Captain Rounds took their names.

"What brings you boys here?" Captain Rounds said, adding, "And don't tell me you're here for business, because I would've heard," and slipped something in the waitress's hand, accompanying the gesture with a _thank you_ and a piercing look. The waitress nodded, a lock of dark brown hair fleeing her ponytail and falling over her face, and went away.

Adam fruitlessly tried to explain that he was there for the market, which didn't fly because nobody strayed this deep into land if they were only pursuing a bargain, and there were spells in place all over Le Mur and within Faerie to make sure customers didn't take the general "get your magical items at the source" appeal of the market to heart and their curiosity was kept at bay.

"All right," Captain Rounds said, "I'm going to assume that you were lost. Is that right?" Adam nodded, returning the captain's amused smile. "And I'm going to assume that you have a good, morally unquestionable, innocuous to me and my crew reason to lie about the context of this mishap, and that the truth would explain why I don't quite know what to make of that puppy of a companion you brought over here."

"Hey," Kris said after a beat, a delayed reaction to the captain's jab.

The captain laughed once, blunt, and said, still looking at Adam, "And it would be correct to believe your current destination is precisely the market you began your journey at."

"Well, technically I want to get _home_," Adam said with a playful smile, and Captain Rounds raised her eyebrow in a way that told Adam not to be purposely cute in her general direction, "but yes, that would be a good place to get home from. Better than fuck knows where, at least."

"Good," Captain Rounds said, "it's important to have one's goals clear," and then the waitress was back with her hand carefully and protectively guiding a young blonde woman by the hip towards their table.

The captain had already risen to her feet, and so had the silent man to her left, so Adam and Kris did the same, and the blonde girl offered a quick sweet smile to them, permission to sit, as her hands were taken hold of and lifted in the air by the captain.

"Girl, you just get hotter and hotter every time I see you," the captain said, shaking her head in mock disbelief, grinning widely.

"Well, that's what happens when you don't _visit_," the girl said, "or stay in one place for long enough to have a shipping address to send you _pictures_."

"Hey, I've tried to invite you aboard a million times over the past couple years," the captain said. "Your dad kept telling me you were too busy with school and too busy helping out your BFF and too busy," and here she raised her voice both authoritative and excitedly, "taking a sabbatical around the _world_. You've gotta tell me all about that, missy."

Missy laughed heartily, face lighting up, and took a seat next to the captain before saying, "I will as soon as you introduce me to the nice people keeping you company on this hard, lonely night," and giggling at the captain's fingers digging in her ribs.

"Well, at least some things are the same," the captain said about that, and the girl said, "You tickling me could be seen as inappropriate now that you're not my babysitter, though," and the captain said, "Seen by whom?" and then Kris dared to look at Adam and Adam was looking back, eyes amused, a grin firmly in place. Kris mirrored it unconsciously and, for a split second, for the first time since they'd met, Kris felt like Adam was looking at him and seeing something other than an object who happened to move and talk on its own. He felt like they really were two people traveling side by side on their way to something else, and maybe Kris was involved in this leg of Adam's journey, and Adam had forcefully added himself to Kris's, and that had been it since the beginning, but now Adam was _seeing_ that, looking at Kris differently.

It felt more important than Kris thought it should, his chest filling with a rush of hopefulness that had no place in a situation like this, and then the captain was saying, "All right," and Adam was looking away, and the moment was broken.

"All right," she repeated, "this young lady right here is Miss O'Connell," and she turned to Miss O'Connell, gesturing towards them, "and this is one Adam Lambert, from that crazy outside world you irresponsibly walked out into," first, then, "and Kris. Claims not to have a last name. I'm inclined to believe he's a unicorn."

"Nah," Adam said quickly, "he's just in the witness protection program. His last name is top secret."

"Really?" the girl said interestedly, and Adam laughed.

"Are you?" he said to Kris.

"Not that I remember," Kris said, "but I could have had my memory wiped. It would explain some stuff."

Miss O'Connell chuckled and held out her hand for both Kris and Adam, who shook it orderly, telling them twice to please call her just Katy so she'd maybe not feel like a child being scolded at some point through the night.

After Katy related some of her travels and a run-in with some famous movie star she hadn't recognized at first that had Adam exchanging _oh my god_'s and _I know, right?_'s with her and sighing wistfully, Katy asked, "So you're going back to the market, huh? You guys should get Lil to take you. She loves civilian company. It reminds her of her glory days."

"Don't overstep your boundaries," Captain Rounds said affably, and Katy nodded.

"Fine, I can admit your glory days are still ongoing," Katy said, "but I still think you like civilian company and should take them."

"I wouldn't be opposed to that," Adam chimed in. "It'd sure beat walking around trying not to lose any vital body parts to ditches or witches—"

"Or idiocy," Kris added, shooting him a sharp look that made Adam laugh and raise his hands in defeat.

"All right," the captain said, "I guess I can take the two of you home. My ship sets off tomorrow at six hundred hours, on the dot. My non-paying passengers leave with me or I leave without them."

"Do you guys even have a place to stay tonight?" Katy added, holding Captain Rounds's gaze almost defiantly. The captain turned towards them.

"Do you?" she echoed, eyes going from Kris to Adam and back again.

"Not really, ma'am," Kris ventured, and was shot down by the captain's angered look and Katy's boisterous laugh.

"Don't call me that again, winky," the captain said, "or I won't give the two of you proper clothes so the crew won't laugh you off the ship for going around dressed like—" She grimaced. "—that."

"Hey, I happen to like how I'm dressed," Adam said, voice edging in rising fondness for Captain Rounds, and Kris shook his head.

"You're not going to say no to a new costume, are you," the captain said disbelievingly, and Adam conceded her point. "You have any belongings to gather? Miss O'Connell here should guide you to your quarters tonight, and I don't like it when she's kept waiting."

"My sleeping hours suffer," Katy said in a childish voice, and Captain Rounds shook her head at the mockery. "You need to stop mothering me."

"Worrying is not mothering," the captain said, and then told Katy, "You can't say I never do anything nice anymore."

Katy laughed in outrage. "You're being nice for my sake!" she quipped. "You're always nice for my sake. It's everybody else you treat horribly."

"Didn't I teach you not to lie?" Captain Rounds said.

"Not that I recall," Katy said. "What you taught me was to lie convincingly, which—"

"—you're not doing right now, so my point stands." She turned to Adam and shared, not entirely serious, "You give away the best years of your life to raise somebody's child and then they turn away and badmouth you to strangers."

"I'm sure you did well by her," Adam said, sounding sincere, "and thank you _so much_ for—"

Captain Rounds shot him a sharp look that stopped him talking. "Don't mention it. I don't like pleasantries. The only thing I need from you is that you don't tell my crew you're complete strangers. I don't want them thinking they can bring anybody they want aboard."

*

After the library and the forest and the crater Kris had slept in when he'd first hit land, the ship was nearly a palace. The wind made it sway a little as they walked across the gangway and onto deck, and Katy said, "If you ever need to throw up, make your way to the nearest restroom or pick up a bucket," but to Kris, the feeling of being suspended mid-air, even if it was on a sturdy ship deep within the atmosphere, came rushing in with a feeling of familiarity and fading loneliness.

*

Once she got going, Katy was a serious talker.

"This is my father's ship," she said as she unlocked the door to the deckhouse, which explained why the captain hadn't hesitated to put her in charge of showing them around. "Lil took over five years ago. The crew wasn't really happy about it at first, but they've all always liked her, so they came around in a passably timely fashion."

"All of them?" Adam said.

"Well, the ones who wanted to keep their jobs, anyway," Katy said, grinning.

They took a ladder that led into the captain's office, a relatively small room containing what looked like a hand-carved wooden desk and chairs, and several locked bookshelves and display cabins. Adam would remark later that it was cozy and elegant, which had surprised him coming from a pirate ship commander—"They're not pirates," Kris would say, and Adam would laugh around the rim of his wine glass and tell Kris that wasn't the point—and Kris would let it go and explain that the captain hadn't been born or raised in the trade, and people in Faerie had different standards anyway.

From there, they went down a small staircase and then were led through a narrow, equally cared for hallway into a double guest cabin. Captain Rounds's ship didn't carry passengers as a rule, but Katy's dad had made a habit of having friends over for lengthy periods of time and occasionally picking up strays—she said this smiling playfully back at them—, a habit the current captain had maintained, and there were several cabins made up to the purpose, the one Kris and Adam would be occupying among them.

"It's a little small," Katy said, which seemed kind of pointless considering they were on a ship, but it was nice of her to voice the thought, "and so is the bathroom." She gestured towards the small door set between the foot of one of the beds and a desk fastened to the wall near the entrance to the room. "And there's a trick to getting the tap in the bathtub to work," but it was the best possible place to put them in, as it was adjacent to the captain's in-port quarters, "so you can have breakfast with us without getting sidetracked into the gunroom."

Adam left his messenger bag in a lockable cupboard while Katy told them if they wanted to take a bath, they should do it before they sailed, as less accidents were bound to happen that way, and she'd be right back with some proper clothes.

"So," Kris said once the door closed behind her, gesturing at the bathroom, "want to go first?"

Adam shook his head a little too casually. "It's fine," he said. "We wouldn't be here if you hadn't stalked the captain while you were a star."

"It's not stalking if you're—"

Adam chuckled dryly and said, enunciating, "That was me, saying thanks."

"Oh," Kris said, glancing down at his shoes. "Okay." He looked up and nodded. "You're welcome."

*

This time, Kris managed to fall asleep as soon as he felt dawn coming, and woke up sometime before noon. He stumbled blearily into the bathroom—tiredness was still a new and unwanted feeling, but at least none of his muscles were sore—and found himself face to face with a string of post-its attached to the frame of the mirror. One of them called for Adam to be in the captain's quarters by noon, which explained why he'd already vanished from the cabin; a second one told Kris he could find Katy in the music room, which explained why the third note included a plan of the ship; and the fourth post-it was written in ballpoint pen ink and significantly less perfect calligraphy, and Kris assumed Adam had written it before he caught a glimpse of the signature at the bottom. It said he'd left Kris's half of the breakfast the cook had brought for them earlier in the morning on a tray on the desk, and the cook had said the glass bell covering it would keep all food and drink hot or cold, whatever it was supposed to be, but he hadn't tested its efficiency and it wasn't his fault if the temperature was out of whack.

The food was fine, Kris realized after a few minutes, eying his unmade bed next to Adam's pristinely fixed one and wondering if someone would come by to make his or if it would be rude not to do it himself, and then, suddenly, the ship started moving.

*

The music room was located towards the stern of the ship, facing starboard, and three consecutive windows opened up to reveal a view of the air harbor they'd only just left.

Katy was sitting at a narrow piano when Kris knocked on the door, and a young lady dressed in a tux reminiscent of the 1920s dashed up to let him in.

The first thing that caught Kris's eye was how, unlike the previous few days, this one was sporting a gray, cloudy sky, and Kris sensed a storm coming. He'd seen the way this business worked, but it would be interesting to be caught up in the middle of it, even though he didn't think Captain Rounds would be up for letting either him or Adam chime in on the actual process of collecting energy. Captain Rounds was the kind of ship captain who acted like a typical, if not openly gentle, host to her guests, but giving up a few hours of her time to make them feel at home and giving them things to spend their time on was a far way from allowing them to break her business routine. After all, they were guests, not temps.

"Good morning," Kris said, "or afternoon, I guess," and Katy returned the greeting and smiled up at him as she scooted over on the leather bench, leaving enough room for Kris to slide in next to her. "So, what are we doing here?"

"Well," she said, pressing a key as accompaniment to her words, "Lil has decided Adam needs to learn how to fend for himself in this cruel, cruel world, and for whatever reason she suggested I help you get acquainted with a piano."

"Okay," Kris said, confused. "Is that—"

Katy chuckled. "Don't question her; she's kind of weird, but she's usually right. You're probably good at this. Have you ever played before?" At that, her eyes widened, and when she continued, her tone was slightly anxious. "You're not, like, a renowned pianist or anything, right? Because I wouldn't put it past her to bring you in so you can bring my ego down a notch."

"No," Kris laughed, "no. I've never actually seen—" and, at Katy's curious look, amended, "I mean, touched a piano before. I've seen them. I just haven't felt compelled to try and play them."

"Okay," Katy said, breathing out a sigh of relief and smiling, "good."

They started off with a slow scale, which Katy then broke down into notes. Then they went through the keys from start to finish, with Katy teaching him the name of each sound and motion and singing along to the few of them she was able to reach. Kris tried to pick up where she'd left off, and they ended up screeching through a melody he improvised on piano.

"That was good, though," Katy said, when she stopped wheezing from laughing so hard. "That was pretty great. Why don't you— You should try that again. Without me belting it down to shreds."

"It wasn't that bad," Kris said politely, and Katy hit him in the arm, called him a liar and slid off the piano bench, going to sit on a chair by the window and urging him to play again.

He centered himself on the bench and looked back at her before concentrating on the keys under his hands. He tried to run through a small portion of the melody with his eyes open and focused on the keys, picturing and memorizing what the string of notes would look like on paper. Halfway through, he lost track of what he was trying to do, and had to begin again; halfway through that, his hands began tripping over each other and his fingers stopped cooperating, so that by the third error, he'd forgotten how to use them at all.

"Maybe if you close your eyes," Katy suggested. He'd just thought of the same thing, so he saw no reason not to do it if both he and somebody else believed it would help.

It did. He got into the right frame of mind by humming a little under his breath, and then the piano was matching note for vocal sound under his fingertips, and it all felt natural in a way that nothing else he'd done since his fall had felt. After a few minutes playing, his wrists were a little sore, but the song had taken flight and started sounding like a live, breathing creature, shaping up like the promise of a journey to come.

It was when that thought crossed his mind that he faltered. It wasn't normal to sit at a piano and suddenly be able to play without fault—while it did happen to otherwise common people, it only did rarely, and Kris was supposed to act inconspicuously, draw all attention away from himself. Both the captain and Katy had been incredibly welcoming and generous, but there was no way of knowing, from the perspective of a human being like Kris had for all intents and purposes become, whether their morals encompassed letting Kris go if they found out he was a star.

He slowed down. He opened his eyes and made a mistake, which seemed to wake Katy from her enthralled state, then another, which surprised her. By the fourth slip-up, Katy was smiling at him, not like she was happy to see him fail but like she was finally reacting to what the song had made her feel, and the fifth one didn't even faze her.

"That was wonderful," Katy said when the last few notes faded into silence. "If you go a little slower, I could transcribe it into sheet music for you. Lil would love to hear it, and I'm sure Adam would too."

*

"So, why sail today?" Adam asked when they were having lunch in the captain's quarters. He looked good—his hair was full-on black now instead of the dark brown it had been last night, and it seemed slightly shorter, bangs asymmetrical and framing his face without reaching the edge of his jaw. He was wearing the clothes Katy had picked out for them the night before, a black pair of pants and a black vest over a dark blue shirt, and for some reason it all seemed to fit him better than what he'd been wearing on his own.

Kris took a second to wonder why he hadn't realized he was looking that closely, and then realized they'd spent a lot of time together in close quarters, and there hadn't been much else to look at when you needed a break from reading books.

Captain Rounds gave Adam a long, hard look. "You do know what my business is, right?"

Adam pursed his lips. "I don't believe I've been briefed on the subject."

"Lightning," Captain Rounds said. "We get going when there's a good storm coming."

"Is that safe?" Adam said, barely managing to keep the panicked edge that had broken out all over his face off his voice.

"Of course it is," the captain said. "We don't sail against it; we sail into it. That makes all the difference."

"It's a little too late to jump off the deck right now," Kris chimed in, just in case Adam was considering the possibility.

"The ship was built to this very purpose," Captain Rounds said, "and the crew was trained to know their way around it."

Adam nodded, taking the information in. "Okay," he said, "and how does that work, exactly?"

"You're in Faerie, kid," Captain Rounds said, and Adam tilted his head expectantly. "You don't ask: you assume it's magic."

Katy piped in with, "She learned that the hard way," and then they were being treated to a story about fresh-faced twenty-year-old Lil Rounds dismembering a large nautical compass because it pointed in the direction of either the nearest storm, the nearest harbor or upwards, because no artificial magnetic field could possibly be large enough to keep a compass working, and _upwards_ was such a circumstantial direction it couldn't possibly have a magnetic field at all. "Of course, then she got into the business of catching lightning and improved my dad's methods by baring everything to its smallest magical core," Katy concluded.

"So it's not always bad to want to make sense of things," Captain Rounds said sternly, "but it would take a much, much longer time to understand how this ship works than you're willing to spend in Faerie."

"What she means is 'trust her,'" Katy supplied.

Adam shared a look with the captain, and Captain Rounds pressed her lips together in some semblance of a reassuring smile.

After that, Adam seemed inclined to believe her.

*

Kris didn't see Adam again until dinnertime, which they had by themselves because Katy had called in an early night and the captain had ordered her first mate—who had a name, and that name was Anoop, which Kris had thought was Katy's way of messing with him until he'd heard Captain Rounds address him as such—to gather the crew in her office so Captain Rounds could indulge them all in both a good, healthy meal, and some business talk.

When Kris walked into their cabin, Adam was sitting on his bed with a heavy-looking tome on his lap. His shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows.

"You've lost weight," Kris pointed out, brows furrowed.

"Thanks," said Adam tiredly. "Walking for hours with an incredibly irritating companion might turn out to have been useful after all."

"I didn't mean it as a compliment," Kris said. "Your arms look like toothpicks."

Adam looked up from the map he was studying. Kris expected him to say something negative back, but Adam didn't even glare. "Thanks," he repeated, though this time it came out sounding more like a grumble than a genuine expression of gratitude.

"I just think you should eat more," Kris said, a little defensive, and then the young lady who'd waited on Katy all day long knocked on the door and asked them to follow her out to a small dining area set under the after edge of the bridge.

"So nonsensical means you assume magic," Adam said as they walked up to deck. "What's the most likely answer when your choice is coincidence versus magic?"

Kris opened his mouth to offer an opinion, but before he could, Katy's maid said, "Physics," and her tone was so sharp Kris decided it wasn't his place to disagree.

She waited until they were both sat down to leave for the galley, and it occurred to Kris that the quiet night in conjunction with the design of the ship and the view available from the underside of the bridge was vaguely—

"Okay, this is fancier than the last date I went on," Adam said.

—romantic. It looked romantic. Which was completely inconsequential, but it made Kris feel a little uncomfortable even though he knew captains often used this spot to discuss business with important clients. It wasn't like its only purpose was to create an ambience. Sometimes the view simply put people in a good mood.

"It's not fancy," Kris said. "It just happens to look fancy, I guess."

Adam laughed. "Okay," he said, "let's bury the hatchet and enjoy this?"

"What hatchet?" Kris said, shaking his head like their journey so far had had zero bumps, and Adam nodded in approval.

They watched the stern of the ship leave images and clouds behind in silence until their food arrived and Kris realized one thing.

"I think I'm not jet-lagged anymore," he told Adam.

"Great," Adam said, then backtracked. "Wait, that's a good thing, right?"

Kris thought about it for a moment. He was adapting to a life light years away from home. "I don't know if it's good," he attempted, the words feeling foreign for the first time since he'd landed—he wasn't used to communicating through vocal chords, or sounds, or even actual words, even if humans translated his messages into them. "But," he went on, "it's almost definitely not bad for us to have a similar sleeping schedule until I can—I mean, until we're done with—you know."

Adam pressed his lips together in a way that looked understanding and almost compassionate, and the small nod he offered was bittersweet enough to let Kris know he'd understood what Kris meant.

Kris took a deep breath and changed the subject. "So what have you been doing with Captain Rounds all day long?" he asked, and started in on his food.

"She's just showed me around the ship and introduced me to the crew so they know not to kick me off into a mortal fall," Adam said, and, in a dismissive rush, added, "And she's teaching me something."

Kris's eyebrows raised. "Uh," he said slowly, "_what_ exactly is she—"

"I don't really want to talk about it," Adam said, laughing. "I was convinced I'd be crap at it and it turns out I don't actually suck that much, and I don't want to jinx it. And don't look at me like that, it's perfectly normal and beneficial for me—and you, I guess—and, actually, it's even kind of fun."

"Katy's teaching me how to play piano," Kris said, to be fair. "What is the captain teaching you?"

"I'll tell you eventually, I swear," Adam said, "but it's really fucking useful, and I'm loving it, and I can't believe she thought of that for me. It's kind of incongruous, but I guess she has a point. We actually have a lot of things in common," Adam said, and Kris felt a subject change coming on. "I think she took us in because my predicament reminded her of her own when she came here. I asked what her circumstances were, but she just started talking about the weather."

Kris bit his lip. "Don't make her talk about it," he advised.

"I wouldn't," Adam said.

"Good," Kris said sincerely.

They ate, indulging in small talk, and the maid brought out dessert, and, by the time they were done, the moon was high up in the dark sky, blurred by the flimsy trail of a big light gray cloud. The night was still quiet, and Kris was feeling more relaxed than he had in decades, so he took the chance to take a risk, hoping for the better.

"I know I haven't been exactly gracious about your—goal in looking for me," Kris said, and Adam tilted his head as if to mean, 'You don't say.' "I still don't think it's a good idea," he clarified, "but I've realized you're really acting out of good intentions, so go ahead. Tell me about him."

"About who?" Adam said, then gasped, "oh," clearly taken aback by the realization, "about Brad?"

"Unless you've changed your mind and decided to give me to a different not-boyfriend, then yeah," Kris said, going for amused and friendly, "about Brad. I want to know what it is that you find worthy of a trip through Faerie where you could easily get us both killed."

"Well, I didn't know your heart was made of rainbows and unicorns when I—" He stopped all of a sudden, and licked his bottom lip. "Wait. I did."

"You did what?"

"I did know that," Adam said, looking the spitting image of someone who was having an epiphany. "Brad was—_is_ really into the whole occultism and astronomy thing. I'm almost sure he's talked about this, about stars and accounts of them falling and turning out to be sentient and sapient and full of knowledge, and getting killed for spells before they can divulge any secrets."

"That's new," Kris said blankly.

"I mean," Adam said, "I'm not sheltered. My family's made up of largely secular Jews and they've never done the whole 'don't buy that magical thing, magic is evil' thing. But, for me, magic's always been science that can't be explained yet. Not that I'm much a science person, just that—magic is in _things_. Objects. Which come from fuck knows where, but people don't have it, and they can't use it on other people unless it's through those objects."

"So..." Kris said, not entirely sure where Adam was going with that.

"Brad thinks it's the opposite way. There's that whole conspiracy theory about—something about the objects being covers for real, like, witchcraft or whatever," Adam said, "so that the public doesn't feel scared by those people who practice it and ostracize them or whatever."

"That's not right," Kris said. He wasn't solving—he couldn't solve; he was just a star—the mysteries of the world for Adam, but he figured dismantling a little bit of paranoia was all right.

"No, but Brad is really interested in where that magic comes from," Adam said. "And one of his theories is it comes from the stars."

"That's not true either," Kris said seriously.

"Okay," Adam said. "But I think that might have been why I was so set on getting a star specifically for him. He was breaking up with me and a star fell and I was like, 'okay, that's gotta be a sign.'" Adam waited for confirmation, but Kris stayed silent. Up until now, he'd sent signs; he'd never _been_ one. But if Adam hadn't thought he was, he'd probably have been dismembered and used and sold in parts by now. Kris was willing to let Adam keep thinking that, and he was willing to start thinking it himself.

"But why go through with it? Why can't you just let life take its course and wait for things to get better or just not get anything at all?" Kris said, and there was an edge of something he didn't recognize in his tone. It was bitter, and it wasn't about being treated as a gift. Adam genuinely saw him as something other than a piece of rock and gas now, and certainly taking a star to someone who was obsessed with them was a pretty decent gift, so good it really might make him reconsider his stance on Adam. But, captivity issues aside, it still felt like that wasn't the right path for Adam to go down. It felt like there was a better one.

"I don't want to leave it up to chance. I want to hold on to him," Adam said. "He's great. He's interesting and funny and he makes me feel good about life—"

Kris snorted. "When he's not breaking up with you, you mean," he said.

"Well, that did send me here," Adam said. "In a way, he sent me here. And, if nothing else, it's been an adventure." He raised his glass and added reverently, "And I wouldn't change a thing about that."

Kris lifted his own glass in the air and mirrored Adam's toast. They both could have ended up in a much worse place if this all had happened differently; he could give Adam that much.

*

It wasn't until three days later, when Katy had decided the night was clear enough to have a bit of a party on deck before the storm hit, that Kris realized what Adam had been spending so much time with the captain for.

She had decided to teach Adam how to use a sword.

Kris could see how Adam had thought it seemed incongruous: Adam hadn't even looked comfortable when he was handling a vial full of deadly poison, and, according to Adam, that was tightly capped. An uncovered sword, on the other hand, he might accidentally gut himself with, or cut somebody's head off, or slash off a few toes. But Adam had been telling the truth when he'd said he wasn't so bad at it—Captain Rounds wasn't putting all of her might behind her moves, but she was being actively aggressive, and Adam was matching every advance, holding the sword right almost like it was a natural thing for him, and never stepping out of the area the captain had delineated by the wheelhouse. He hadn't even lost balance once.

So Kris understood how it could be incongruous in theory, but, in practice, it was just—it was such an appealing sight Kris couldn't bring himself to draw his eyes away from it until Katy tapped him on the shoulder.

It was just—it was beautiful, the motion, the ease, and there was something magnetic about Adam, something that made Kris _want_ him.

Kris shouldn't be wanting the person who'd captured him as a token of his affection for somebody else, but suddenly every pang of sadness he'd felt when Adam mentioned Brad—every feeling that couldn't be explained away by the fact that Adam was trying to win over somebody who didn't truly want him back and Kris cared enough to want something better for him—and when Adam mentioned going home, all those moments he hadn't been able to read when they were going on—he _wanted_. He wanted to be on the other side of it. He wanted to be the person Adam considered worthy of a star.

He wasn't sure how he felt about that development.

"He's getting good at that," Katy said, and Kris shrugged; he hadn't seen enough to be able to tell if Adam had made any progress, or if he was as good as he'd been the first time around. Kris certainly hadn't made a lot of progress in his piano-playing, although Katy had been teaching him to understand music as written down by man. He had a feeling Katy thought he was near illiterate by now, but it was better than letting her know he was a star.

"Is that going to be useful?" Kris said, because they were in Faerie, and not everyone after them would use physical weapons to get their way. They were more likely to use magic.

Katy laughed breathily and gave him a winning smile. "Very," she said. "Believe me."

And, for some reason, Kris kind of did.

*

After a while, Adam sat down with Captain Rounds for a brightly colored drink, and three sailors from the crew climbed onto the bridge with various musical instruments and began playing. Even before Katy walked up to him and said, tipsy, "Isn't it _awesome_ that Lil actually keeps musicians in her crew? I think it's awesome," and dragged him onto the dance floor, Kris already felt like swaying.

The half moon appeared vividly every few clouds the ship passed by—it was a dark night, but not a stormy one, and Kris found himself not missing home, for once. Every clear night hour he'd gone through since the fall had reminded him of where he should be, where he would be if that damned troll hadn't sent a colossal diamond ring tumbling into space.

"I don't know what's going on between you and your boyfriend," Katy said, falling back into step after Kris had accidentally stamped on her toe, "but I'm not going to be the one to tell him he should dance with you."

Being a star for years and years was more than enough for Kris to know grand gestures were good for nothing. Forcing people to feel things never went well, and it was a dying shame he was so aware of that he'd told Adam off for believing otherwise and yet he still felt the urge to maybe push things a little in his favor. He wanted Adam to change his destination, just a little bit.

"He's not," Kris replied quickly, feeling his cheeks flame, "he's not my boyfriend." He was a star; he shouldn't feel embarrassment, least of all over something as common as this—someone misinterpreting your words or looks, or cluing in on your feelings for someone whose current intentions were using you as a token of their love for somebody else.

"So that's what's going on," Katy said, looking like suddenly the entire world had stopped being a mystery to her, which Kris was pretty sure it had not, "okay. Either way, I'm not going to tell him to dance with you, and you clearly want to, so you should get your ass over there before the band starts passing around another bottle of vodka."

Kris shook his head. "I have no right to interfere—"

"Just because he's not your boyfriend now?" Katy gave him a look that sent Kris's courage back on its heels. "How else are you going to get him to be?"

"I'm _not_," Kris said.

Kris had wanted to go back home when this was all over. Adam had only factored in that plan insofar as he'd promised Kris a Babylon candle for his troubles, but Kris thought it best to refrain from telling Katy that. And he didn't feel capable of trying to—what, _seduce_ Adam? That was so not something he felt comfortable with, not when Adam was so hung up on the idea of having someone else, and not when Adam had just started seeing him as a real living being as opposed to an inanimate star shaped like a human being.

"Come on," said Katy anyway, pressing her lips together in a small, mischievous smile, "I can't teach you how to follow," and Kris allowed her to push him because it was just dancing.

It didn't have to be some kind of advance; Adam wouldn't take it as one. And Kris had already been trying to be friendlier to make their journey more comfortable for both of them, so it couldn't hurt. And heck, for all he knew, maybe the jealousy was only due to losing Adam as a potential friend. He'd warmed up to him, and he had developed a lot of affection for him, and he wasn't used to feeling affection that could be returned. He was a star; his relations with human beings had been pretty much entirely one-sided before he'd fallen.

"My feet are _killing_ me," Katy told Adam as soon as they reached him. He was leaning back against the door to the wheelhouse, and he smiled at Kris when he saw them approach. Kris suddenly understood why people sometimes felt nausea at the thought of talking to someone they were in love with.

Not that Kris was in _love_. He was pretty sure, whatever this was, it wasn't _that_ bad. He was just confused, and probably misinterpreting whatever signals the chemicals in his human body were sending his way.

"Wanna take over?" Katy said to Adam, grasping at Kris's arms so he'd know what she meant without resorting to awkward explanations. Kris rolled his eyes.

*

Dancing with Adam was probably more dangerous than angering a psychotic murderer on the loose.

Adam was clumsier as a dancer than he'd been at handling a sword, and kept losing their step and position even though they were really just swaying to the music. The whole thing was pretty uncomplicated, but Adam continued to mangle it consistently, and at some point Kris tried to lead, which made things worse, and then Adam threw Kris's arms around his neck and pretended to slow-dance until the music actually slowed down to accommodate them.

"Are they playing a _Beatles song_?" Kris asked, looking up at the bridge in amazement. The band had been playing popular Faerie music for the past hour, and suddenly they'd shifted into 60s pop, even if it was a slow version of a song that wasn't particularly boppy to begin with.

"They are?" Adam said, slowing down and raising his chin to get a better listen. "Fuck, they _are_. That's the first thing I've recognized all night." He looked down at Kris with a winning smile. "And I actually come from the real world."

"I know more about the real world than you ever will," Kris remarked, and Adam lifted their joined hands to resume the dancing. "You're not used to ballrooms, are you," Kris said.

"You're not going to tell me _you_ are," said Adam, soft. It was a jab, but it didn't sound like one.

"Well, no," Kris said, "but, unlike some people I could name, I can't assume the negative just from what I know about your past."

Adam laughed, a surprised, boisterous sound that reverberated throughout the entire ship, and Kris wasn't deluded enough to think the fact that the two things happened in quick succession meant Adam's laughter had any sort of doing in what followed it, but it still felt a little bit like it when the sky began to growl. Kris looked around, and noticed Captain Rounds had been absently watching them.

She straightened up immediately and doled out a few orders, then trotted towards them until she was right next to Adam and tugging at his arm, and he leaned down so she could whisper something in his ear, frowning lightly at Kris the whole time.

Kris looked at his hands, and noticed there was a spark dying out in his nails, a strange shine on his skin just about done fading.

He hoped that wasn't something Captain Rounds and her crew would know to associate with fallen stars, but there was no time to ask before the weather became louder and a blanket of rain washed down the deck and Kris and Adam and some of the crew members who'd merrily been minding their own business throughout the party but whose job had nothing to do with collecting lightning were being ushered into the hull and into risk-void safety.

*

"What just happened?" Adam said when they were in their cabin, running a hand through his hair. A few drops of rain caught on his skin, and Kris watched them fall in rivulets down the collar of his shirt.

Kris plopped down on his bunk and wiped his damp hands on his pants. "A storm happened."

"They didn't even give us time to help," Adam said, sounding vaguely annoyed.

"Has the captain been teaching you something other than the using a sword thing? Which, by the way, good job staying in one piece."

Adam laughed and said, "Thanks, and no, that's pretty much the whole of it."

"Well, then she knew you—well, both of us—would be more of an obstacle than an asset," Kris said. "So she got us out of the way before we caused any havoc by trying to do things we weren't qualified to do."

"But you're a star," Adam said, and Kris tilted his head at that; he had no idea what Adam was trying to imply. "You'd probably know how to deal with that," Adam explained after a beat. "They could have used your help."

Kris shook his head. "Yeah, that would have been a bad idea," he said, thinking about his still being a source of light on some level. "I think I attract lightning. I would get fried if I went out there right now. And, for the record, they don't need our help. This is not an accident. This is what they do."

"Right," Adam said, slowly. He sat down on his own bed and began to unbutton his vest. When he was halfway through, he added, voice small, "I'm still having a little trouble wrapping my head around the idea that someone sees storms as a blessing when they're sailing. In movies, storms are—well, they're pretty cool, but if you see one, you expect tragedy, like someone falling into the sea and freezing, or, like, a ship wreck."

They got ready for bed in near silence. After a while, the sound of thunder broke it a few times, and randomly, Adam said, "Is it me, or is the ship actually steadier now than when the weather was calm?"

The ship took that moment to begin swaying more wildly than it had for as long as they'd been on board, and Kris figured that answered Adam's question.

*

The storm slowed down enough to let them fall asleep, but Kris woke up again just hours later, in the dark, hearing loud voices coming from outside the door and from on deck, a swirl of activity just breaking out. He sat up and leaned back against the headboard. In his bunk, Adam was stirring and breathing unevenly, like he hadn't been able to get to sleep at all.

Kris rubbed his eyes and vaguely made out the shape of Adam kicking off his blankets and slipping on a pair of shoes.

"We can't be the only ones trying to sleep here," Adam said, genuinely curious. "How do people manage?"

Kris shrugged and felt a yawn coming. "They're used to it. It just takes a while."

Adam groaned and said, "Fuck," and Kris looked at him and said, "You want to play chess or something?" and Adam laughed, a throaty noise that sounded painful, and said, "If the purpose of that is putting me to sleep, then sure," and Kris flicked on the little bedside lamp attached to the wall between the two bunks and opened the drawer of the nightstand separating them and explained to Adam how to play so the pieces wouldn't be sent flying across the room or into any unsuspecting eyes.

It took two wins on Kris's part, both of them so massively ridiculous he couldn't even be proud of them, for Adam to lie back on his bed and say, "I know this is supposed to be a challenging game and all, but I'm so sleep-deprived I can't even _be_ challenged," and sit up again just to do something.

The real problem with abrupt ship movement was the cabin they shared was so small that, if your position was off by an inch, you'd be sharing personal space. When Adam refocused on his surroundings, he went quiet. His legs were bracketing one of Kris's, and Kris thought he might be considering apologizing, not that it was necessary, but Adam just sat there and looked from Kris's knees up to his face, and Kris suddenly became aware of the fractional motion of Adam's eyelashes, and the fact that he was sitting on the edge of the bunk and they were so close Kris could feel the fading tail of Adam's breath on his nose, and that he'd frozen at some point in the past two minutes, because he felt stuck in place until Adam's lips pressed against his.

It occurred to him that that was the moment most people froze, and not the other way around.

Then again, Kris couldn't exactly be considered 'people.'

His mouth opened up under Adam's, easy, and he grasped at Adam's arms when Adam's hands came down at both sides of his thighs, holding onto the edge of Kris's mattress. Their noses bumped at the shift, and Kris tilted his head to accommodate it, fingers trailing over Adam's shoulders. He moved one of his hands to the back of his neck and pulled Adam closer, urging him to deepen the kiss. Adam took it in stride, thoroughly exploring Kris's mouth and reducing the space between their bodies, one of his hands leaving the bed and coming up underneath Kris's shirt, large and warm and stroking his side comfortably, making him gasp every time his palm slid minimally past the waistband of Kris's pants.

The kiss had sped up for a moment when Kris had touched Adam's neck, but now it slowed down again, sweet and mellow, and Kris used the hand he'd kept on Adam's shoulder to thumb at his collarbone. He felt Adam relax, let a small sigh out into his mouth.

Then, Adam broke apart with a little effort, pulled his hand out of Kris's shirt and placed it on his thigh—it barely felt like it was there, and at the same time Kris was hyperaware of it, wanting—and said, still close, licking his lip, "So that's what kissing a star is like." Then, he pointed out, "Your ears are glowing a little," which they were. They had to be. Kris felt them darkening quickly now that the moment was gone.

Kris blinked, then chuckled in surprise. "Yeah," he said. Kissing a star. Of course that would pique Adam's curiosity. "That's what that's like."

"The ship's settled down," Adam said, suddenly dodging eye contact, and Kris felt stupid on so many levels he suddenly admired humans for living without omnisciency. If Adam had just been kissing a star—rocks and gas, an _object_—he wouldn't be avoiding eye contact. "We should get some sleep."

But that was what Kris was. He wasn't somebody's boyfriend. This wasn't his place, and he had no idea what he could even do here. It was stupid to consider staying in a world where he clearly didn't belong—so many stars before him would have given their everything for how good Kris had it. He'd fallen, and he'd been found by someone who would give him a ticket home in exchange for acting like a challenge and a gift to someone he wanted to impress.

He was a star, and he'd been kissed just for being one, and it had felt real and worth all that pain he'd seen humans put themselves through on their quest for someone who would make them feel like Kris had felt just minutes ago.

Adam was right: this was an experience. It was a once in a lifetime adventure that they'd both get to go back home having lived. It wasn't a beginning. It wasn't anything it wasn't.

For that alone, the stars above had pulled a million strings.

*

The following morning, they were woken halfway through sunrise to get dressed and ready for breakfast, which they would have at the captain's in-port quarters, as it had become custom once Kris had stopped sleeping all over everybody else's mealtimes.

"We should be getting to the nearest harbor to the Le Mur market in a few hours," Katy said as they all took seats around the captain's dining table.

"We're shooting for sunset," Captain Rounds specified in a friendly tone, "but the wind's blowing south, so we could get there earlier than anticipated. You should be ready to disembark by noon at the latest, just in case. We have another storm to chase, and we can't waste time at anchor."

"She's gonna miss you guys," Katy said, poking her, and the captain shook her head at her. Katy didn't back off, but she added, "We both are, but I'm getting off with you, so I'll miss you for a shorter time." She'd arranged for them to stay at the same inn she'd picked for herself, one where she knew the owner well, so she'd be walking downtown with them.

After some time, the captain switched gears and picked a piece off Adam's scone and said, smiling in a way that Kris had only seen while she was training Adam as a swordsman, "So you're getting home. But you haven't told me what you're getting home to."

"I haven't?" Adam said, and the captain threw him a look that said, 'Don't play with me.' In a friendly fashion. Kris found it all a little intimidating, and took shelter in his coffee cup. "I have a musical on tour to get back to. If they haven't fired me yet for my unexplained absence."

"You excited about that?" the captain said.

Adam gritted his teeth in a reticent smile. "Not really," he said, dipping a pinch of pastry in his hot chocolate, "no. It's not exactly fulfilling. I mean, in a way, it feels like a nine-to-five job, only it's a nine-to-five job I pursued and got and which has to deal with music, and I'm lucky to have a stable gig to get back to in the first place, but it feels like it's not going anywhere anyway."

Kris wondered if that had had something to do with Adam's decision to venture into Faerie—he knew Adam was touring with _Wicked_, but Adam hadn't said that wasn't what he wanted to be doing at that moment. Kris had just assumed it was all about Brad. He'd seen people do even more screwed up things in the name of love, so he hadn't bothered looking for a different explanation. But this—well, this was new, though it didn't necessarily change things.

Captain Rounds looked Adam in the eye and asked, "Do you know where you _want_ to go?" and Adam said, quickly, like you said the truth, "Maybe," and Captain Rounds kept staring into his eyes until Adam caved and told her he'd been thinking about pursuing a solo career as a performer. There were many words that Kris only absorbed as noise, something about the captain knowing people who could give him a hand, and Adam saying he wanted to earn his place, and the captain ending the discussion with, "_Please_," and, "Come by my cabin later today. I'll have some notes and addresses and phone numbers for you. No harm in keeping the possibility of trying to get a head-start on those dreams of yours handy."

Adam thanked her once in that way he did where he managed to sound ridiculously grateful in less than four words, and then Captain Rounds said, "But if a new life's not what you were trying to make by trawling cross Faerie, what is it that's waiting for you that you took such an involved, ass-backwards scenic route to?"

Adam bit his lip, looking at Kris out of the corner of his eye as he said, "Well, I have a—boyfriend. Sort of. If he takes me back. That's kind of why I'm doing this."

Katy looked up from her plate to stick out her bottom lip and coo a little bit. Kris couldn't even tell if it was sincere or mocking or a little bit of both, but he was leaning towards the last possibility, and he snickered when she proved him right by obviously holding back a laugh.

Captain Rounds didn't talk for what seemed like forever, and just when Kris was beginning to worry she had a problem with Adam having a _boy_friend, she said, "Okay. Far be it from me to think less of an adventure if the purpose is a romantic one. Your commitment is commendable. But I hope you're getting more out of this than a story to win someone back."

The air felt heavier for a while as they made their way through the amazing meal set on the table.

"Katy's been gushing about your abilities as a pianist," the captain told Kris after downing the last of her beverage, and Kris was so torn between shrugging dismissively, blushing at the compliment and denying it that he just stood there doing nothing.

"Well," Katy said, "he's not as comfortable and playful as Megan's brother, but he took to it incredibly well for someone who'd never played before." And, winking at Kris, she added, "He seems to have an amazing ear for music."

"Thanks," Kris settled for.

"Is this the same Megan I know? Who has a stepbrother? They're both blond," Adam said, and Kris sent him a grateful look for veering the conversation off course.

Katy shifted her full attention to him, her frown shifting into excitement as she realized how Adam could be familiar with someone she knew. "Did you meet her in Le Mur?"

"Yeah, she's the one who drove me to the market," Adam said.

"Oh," Katy said, "then it's easy to tell if we're talking about the same Megan: was the top of the back of her van lined up with glass bottles?"

"Yeah," Adam said after a beat.

"I did that myself," Katy said proudly, "for her birthday last year. It was pretty tricky, but I'm really proud of my work."

"It looked great," Adam said, sounding sincere. "It felt kind of dangerous, though."

"Oh, it's totally not at all," Katy said, giggling. "There's magic involved."

"Isn't there always," Adam said wistfully.

***

 

**PART III**

 

On paper, adventures are always straightforward. They begin at a starting point, and end at a destination. Sometimes these two places coincide, but they are nevertheless a starting point or a destination, insofar as these labels are applied by the mind looking upon them.

In reality, adventures shake adventurers to the core, teasing and tempting and revealing to them things about the world and about themselves, and about where and how the world and themselves are bound and meant to collide. This doesn't mean a person stops being a person or a star stops being a star; it only means their purpose shifts along their destiny, and, sometimes, so does their heart.

***

The harbor they disembarked onto overlooked the village where the market was held, still active and catching the last peak of business now that it was drawing to a close. A fair way away, through the uphill field and surrounding forest, Adam caught a glimpse of the wall, though he felt closer to his destination emotionally than geographically, somehow.

As they saw the ship off and the sun set, he reached into his pocket for the flower he'd been carrying since Kara's servant girl had given it to him. He wondered if it had an expiration date, and if it would work if he carried it into the real world with him. He wasn't entirely sure what its purpose was; all he knew was that every time he'd gotten himself or Kris in a bad situation in the past week, the flower had tingled in his pocket, and his luck had shifted for the better.

"That's a snowdrop," Katy said before he tucked it back into his pocket. They began walking down a path that seemed to end slightly north east of the market. Katy had said they were going to a smaller inn than the one in the market, but it hadn't occurred to Adam until now that it wouldn't be right in the middle of it. Katy was one of the most _normal_—for certain standards—individuals he'd encountered since setting foot on Faerie, and it was odd to think of her as a local who wouldn't stay where all the other tourists stayed. Then she said, "You got someone on your tail?"

"I'm sorry?"

Katy pressed her lips together. "That flower—it's a lucky charm. It does many, many things, but its main ability is deviation. It senses bad things and creates a bit of a protective bell around the carrier to screw their path around you."

"Fugitives must be big fans," Kris said, and then, "Wait. Who gave you that?"

"This girl at the market, a servant."

Kris turned to Katy. "He sold two weeks of his privacy for a Babylon candle. Which is a good deal if you're not dealing with—" Adam threw him a look, and Kris shrugged. "—things we're not dealing with."

"But if it's not dangerous, why would she give you that?"

"I don't know; she liked me?" Adam offered.

"Well, she probably did like you, but she must have gotten punished for doling out goods like that. You don't just risk that if it's not necessary." Katy gasped. "A servant, as in, for whom? For the person who's tracking you? Why is she tracking you?"

Adam laughed bitterly. "I'd tell you if I knew for sure," he said. "It's complicated."

Katy let out a long-suffering sigh at that, like she was done with the diversions, and said, soft and leaning into Adam, "If this is about Kris being—you know, a thing that shines at night up in the sky—you don't have to lie to me. I've lived in my dad's lightning-catching ship for all my life. Don't peg me for a sheltered little girl, 'cause I'm not one."

"Okay," Adam said, eying Kris questioningly. Kris had clearly heard Katy's words, both because she hadn't concealed them that deeply and because he looked vaguely freaked out, but Adam didn't find anything in his face he could use as either permission or prohibition. "Her name is Kara. She's a witch."

"She give you the Babylon candle without knowing what you were going to use it for?" Katy said, and Adam shook his head and smiled sheepishly. That had been an idiotic move, probably. Or it could have been a good one. He couldn't tell anymore. He had never been able to tell, in all frankness. "She knew. She knows."

"She saved us once, though," Kris said.

"She saved _you_," Adam corrected, because he wasn't the one who'd walked into a building that had just been conjured up by a witch. He was the one who'd freaked out and felt useless and—he patted the scabbard hanging from his belt. With some luck, he wouldn't have to use it, but it was good to know he could defend himself now.

The captain had also given him a cylindric container full of lightning, which he hadn't the faintest idea what he'd ever do with, but had accepted proudly anyway, along with a list of equivalencies in case he ever needed to sell some. Adam was hoping this last leg of his journey wouldn't come to that, either. After all, Katy had promised they could stay in Megan's inn for free—and Adam would feel bad about it, but it was Megan's fault he'd become so caught up in the idea of going to Faerie, and she could have said no when he'd asked for a ride, and he didn't really have anything worth giving other than gratefulness and an unspoken promise that he owed them all a really big favor they could collect on if they ever found themselves in the situation to do so.

"So she either saved me because she liked you," Kris said thoughtfully, partly to himself and partly for Katy's benefit, "or she saved me because she was hoping she could kill me at a later point down the road."

Katy gave them both a sympathetic look. "That servant girl, she must know her master well, and she gave you a lucky charm. I'm inclined to believe this Kara person didn't have the best of intentions when she put that tracking spell on you."

It wasn't something they could deal with, anyhow, and Adam knew if it weren't for that Babylon candle, he might never have found the star, and their fates could have been significantly worse. If he'd made a mistake trusting a stranger—and whether it turned out for the better or not, it had been really fucking irresponsible to make that deal—at least they'd gotten this far, and he knew he could protect himself and Kris from harm. There was more to the sword he was carrying than met the eye, and there was more to Kris than a heart Adam might have readily handed over before he knew the first thing about stars.

Hell, there was more to him than just being a star, and he deserved to get through this unscathed more than Adam did. Adam had promised to give him the last third of the Babylon candle, and he'd make good on that promise as soon as he let Brad know he'd made good on the one that had led him into this to begin with.

Adam wasn't jumping for joy at the idea of Kris going back home, but he knew that was the happy ending for a star, and he wouldn't deprive Kris of it if that was what Kris wanted.

"We're only staying here one more day," Adam told Katy. "I think we can make it through one day."

Katy eyed him skeptically, but didn't argue.

*

It was strange to see Megan again. She looked the same as she had when Adam had met her, except for a few strategic differences in her hairstyle—it had only been two weeks, after all—but this was someone he'd met in the real—in his world, before he knew any different ones existed and that stars were not simple inanimate rocks and that there was business in lightning. It was kind of weird, seeing her here. Something like disconnect.

Of course, as soon as they stepped into the dining room where they'd be having supper that evening, Megan ran up to him and hugged him like they'd known each other forever instead of what was technically barely ninety minutes, and he realized it was silly of him to expect any congruity from her.

The evening went smoothly, at least once Megan stopped talking to Kris as though he was a child—Adam was surprised he hadn't made that particular mistake, given Kris had technically just taken on his human form. He'd just taken so long to absorb Kris was a star that, by the time he'd accepted it as truth, he already saw Kris as an equal.

The market was clearing up, so there already were more than a few rooms available, and Adam and Kris took up two adjacent ones, the doors forming a ninety-degree angle with each other.

It was stupid, but saying goodnight and watching him disappear into his room made a bad, bad kind of anticipation flare up in Adam's chest. A part of it, he knew, was just selfish practicality, a desire to keep watch on his star so it wouldn't get stolen, but most of it was brought on by the repeating knowledge that, soon enough, he'd have to leave Kris behind for good.

He didn't want to leave Kris behind.

And he was probably just delusional and putting too much weight in some suspicions Captain Rounds had whispered into his ear after seeing him and Kris dance, but he was almost certain Kris wanted to be left behind about just as much.

*

He'd implied he'd kissed Kris because he wanted to know what it was like to kiss a _star_.

The realization came crashing through his head like a rush of dizziness when you've been lying down too long and abruptly set your body straight up.

Of course, that could just be because he'd done exactly that.

"This is ridiculous," he murmured, kicking the blankets off and getting out of bed, and then, after he'd washed his face several times to refresh his brain, looking in the mirror, "You're being ridiculous about this."

Adam was no stranger to talking to his reflection as though it was him and the real him was his own therapist or wake-up call, but there was a significant difference between pumping up his self-esteem levels, which were largely a situational issue, and possibly changing the entire point of everything he'd gone through since he'd stepped over the loose stones lining up the one opening on that wall in Le Mur, that wall he wasn't far from anymore now.

Even closer than the wall, steps away instead of full miles, was Kris. Who had looked disappointed as fuck when Adam had tried to make light of his own actions, of the way he hadn't been able to be responsible and hold back and not kiss someone he'd met on his journey to winning somebody else over. He'd wanted to kiss Kris, and he'd barely thought about Brad during his entire stay aboard Captain Rounds's ship, and that was something.

Adam couldn't just go on without looking into it.

*

Knocking on Kris's door in the middle of the night without any certainty that Adam was right to pursue something, anything with him was the hardest part; once he'd felt the solidity of the door under the smack of his knuckles, a weight slid right off his shoulders. Waiting for Kris to come to the door was soothing, even, which Adam understood not at all, but enjoyed all the same.

"'i," Kris said, followed up by a rough-sounding cough. His eyes were less than focused, and his hand was absently rubbing the back of his neck. "Hi." He cleared his throat once more, and spoke calmly. "Did you need something?"

"Yes," Adam said, strong and assured, only it was really fucking hard to follow up a statement like that. What _did_ he need? Answers Kris didn't owe anybody, company made either him or Kris or both of them sound like hookers, and anything else would be a lie. "I'm not—" And then 'used to this' wasn't truthful where it implied Adam wasn't used to propositioning guys in the middle of the night, which he was all too familiar with, though there was usually a hell of a lot more alcohol in his system when he did it. What was he _not_?

He had words for this. He normally had words for everything.

"Fuck it," he said out loud. He stepped into Kris's space with determination, a little desperately, and reached for the back of his neck to tilt his head into what Adam hoped was a clock-stopping kiss not only for him.

It couldn't be, judging by the way Kris was throwing himself into it. His mouth was greedy and pliable all at once, and one of his hands was on Adam's hip, a little scared, a little possessive, while the other rested barely on his upper back, like it wanted to—

He forcibly broke the kiss and said, feeling Kris's breath on his lips, so hard to get any coherent words out, "I'm not kissing you just because you're a star," and Kris's hand vanished from his shoulder blades in practically the same instant Adam heard the door slam shut behind himself.

Carefully, contained mostly only by the knowledge that any sort of emotion would destroy his composure and ability not to kiss Kris again until he'd gotten this out, he breathed, "Are you sure you're—you know—interested?"

"_Yes_," Kris said, so quickly a flush crept up his cheeks right after. He smiled nervously, like he was mocking himself for being so obvious, which was ridiculous.

"In me?" Adam went on. "In this? If you want to—if you're still planning to go back home, that candle is yours. I'm not going to stop you going back home. I'm not going to stop this if you want to go back home either, if you don't want me to. But you need to let me know, right now."

"I don't," Kris said. "It's stupid, it feels totally unreasonable but I want to try this. I want to stay here. There, in—outside Faerie, in your world. With you." He laughed. "It's jumping the gun, I know."

"A little bit," said Adam, grinning. The situation required the kind of impulse Kris was talking about—it was rush the process or bust. It was justified. Adam wasn't going to deny the only basis either of them had to take such a huge decision was brief and misleading and very much not enough, but he so did not care one bit.

"A _lot_," Kris said, returning Adam's smile. It felt like he had something else he wanted to say, but his eyes had fixed on Adam's mouth while he was searching for hints in his face, and he wasn't saying it. Instead, Kris sucked his bottom lip into his mouth and released it with a small smacking sound from his skin—the sound of the conversation trailing off to leave room for a different kind of talking.

Adam tugged at Kris's swollen lip with his teeth, feeling playful, and drew Kris back in.

They stumbled onto Kris's bed really fast and really gracelessly, still kissing, and that was by all means a good development, but Kris was—Adam assumed he'd spied on his fair share of couples and knew what he was getting himself into, but he was still new at it, and, whatever his body was yelling into his bloodstream, Adam didn't want to rush through it.

"Do you glow all the time?" Adam said absently when he pushed the t-shirt Kris had been sleeping in up over his ribs. "Do you glow _everywhere_?" he added, tone vaguely amused by the possibility, which was only half of how he felt about it—the other half was actually pretty innocent curiosity.

"I don't know," Kris said, flushing pink. "Is that going to be a problem? Or a running joke?"

Adam ducked his head to kiss him out of that notion. "You _glow_," he said after, for good measure. "You glow during sex. I'm going to know exactly how you feel about everything I do to you—it's, like, ridiculously fucking hot. You have no idea."

"You forgot 'embarrassing,'" Kris muttered, but he was smiling.

"Think of it as payback for all those centuries you spent watching people fuck," Adam said, and yanked Kris's shirt over his head.

"That's seriously not how star guidance works."

Adam scowled, feigning indignance, and said, "Well, it should be," and shoved his hand down Kris's briefs. Kris was half hard—maybe he was happier than he was turned on, which made the whole glowing thing slightly less foolproof than Adam had imagined—but he responded quickly to the touch, arching and gasping as his cock filled up in Adam's hand.

It was gorgeous, the way Kris's body literally shimmered as he dragged himself deeper into the bed, finding a roomier spot, and as Adam got acquainted with his dick, trying to figure out what made Kris lose it and how and how strongly.

Adam took his time experimenting, just lazy, shifting strokes and intent eyes, and was more than willing to go on a little longer when Kris reached to still Adam's arm.

"What, I don't get to see you?" Kris asked, smirking, and Adam sat up on his knees to unbutton and shrug his shirt off. He shouldn't have gotten dressed at all—thank god he hadn't thrown on a vest.

His belt made a loud dragging sound as Kris's hands pulled it out through the loops, and Adam reached down to undo his fly, sliding off the bed and standing up for a moment to empty his back pocket onto the bed and get rid of his pants and boxers before going back to Kris.

"These need to go," Adam said, tugging at Kris's underwear, and enjoyed watching Kris squirm out of them before picking up the lube.

He hadn't been _planning_ on doing this, he _wasn't_—while he was obviously hoping it would happen at some point if Kris actually was interested in him that way, all he was counting on achieving was _knowing_—but being prepared was one of the few things that'd ever been successfully drilled into his head in his life.

"You ever spy on two guys?" Adam said, which was a totally backwards way of figuring out if Kris was comfortable with his knees bent back and a fingertip prodding into his ass, but the words were out now.

"I know what you're doing, if that's what you're asking," Kris said easily, matter of fact but with a certain fair warning edge to his voice.

Adam laughed, slowly, gently adding a second finger. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," Kris said, beginning to roll his eyes, only the gesture was cut short by a surprised moan when Adam's fingers hit the right spot.

Adam had slept with more than a few subby guys before, people who didn't tense up because that was what sex was about for them, opening up to somebody else's decisions, but that was nothing compared to the way Kris's body actively _adapted_ to him, tight muscle stretching out with incredible ease around his fingers, first, and then his cock, arms holding on tight at times, at others exploratory, hips rocking up to meet Adam's thrusts and face tilting up to meet his mouth, sweet and wanting and utterly reckless.

The glowing dimmed as Adam reached down to jerk Kris through it and Kris breathed harder, moaned louder, and it nearly vanished completely when Kris's head fell back on his pillow and he came all over his stomach and Adam's fist.

The grip of Kris's limbs loosened around Adam's body, but Kris kept matching the rhythm of Adam's hips for a few more thrusts, and Adam came with Kris's fingers still tangled up in his hair, sweaty and curious and definitely, definitely _interested_ on the back of his neck.

*

In the cold light of morning, the sun shone warmly through the windowpanes.

In a way, Adam could say the same thing for the rhetorical cold light of morning. He'd never been a regretter—he was convinced every mistake he made would serve as a stone in a future case of hypothetical rock climbing, and every wrong step he'd taken was what had led him to where he was. And he wasn't unhappy about where he was—the mattress he was lying on felt like magic to his back, and he could see Kris sleeping out of the corner of his eye, the expanse of his back glistening joyfully, brighter than the daylight.

That was his star—his, not Brad's, and a part of him, a loud, crazy, smart-sounding part of him, didn't think that was the right destination anymore. It seemed wrong and self-destructive to let Brad borrow this from him. Kris was now a part of him more than he was a part of his relationship with Brad. If everything turned out the way Adam was hoping for, Brad would have have time to get to know Kris some time down the line, but it would be far too easy for things to get tangled up and complicated if he didn't lay out some boundaries right from the very start.

That didn't mean he couldn't prove to Brad he'd succeeded the way he'd said he would—even if it wasn't _about_ Brad anymore, a promise had been made, and Adam firmly believed in carrying out his promises.

He got dressed and ready, and, while Kris was sleeping, he grabbed a pair of scissors out of his messenger bag and a handkerchief embroidered with the initials of the Spellbound Magpie Inn from the nightstand. Kris stirred lightly as Adam leaned over him, but settled back into the pillow with his face turned away. It made it easier, actually, for Adam to fold a short layer of Kris's hair into the cloth and cut a few strands off without leaving any conspicuous irregularities.

Brad knew Adam had gone searching for a star, not scavenging for pieces of it, but star hair would have to be enough proof he'd fulfilled his end of the deal, and deliberately chosen to let Brad off on his.

*

The one and only post office in Le Mur was located down the first street you walked into if you reached the city through the road coming down from the wall. Adam figured it came in handy for marketgoers, and there wasn't much of a reason to have it anywhere else.

Standing in the middle of the tiny, crowded room, waiting for a line to make itself clear for him, he pulled out his cellphone and called to inform Brad of the outcome of the ridiculous journey he'd set out on the last time they'd talked.

"You got the star?" Brad said incredulously.

"I got the star," Adam said, smug. Maybe he'd just called to gloat, as he probably wouldn't get to see Brad's reaction when he opened the package Adam was about to send.

There was a chuckle down the phone line, and then Brad asked, "So when do I get to see it?"

"I didn't say I was giving it to you. I just said I got the star," Adam said, relishing the turnaround of the Brad situation. "Actually, I've decided to keep it."

Adam could picture Brad's eyebrows shooting up at that. "What the hell are you going to do with a star?"

"Well," Adam said, "I guess I'll do whatever that star wants me to do with him."

"Wh—" Brad began, following that piece of wordlessness with a long pause. Then, carefully, studiously, reminding Adam how much he actually _liked_ Brad, epic love hopes aside, "Did you just refer to a star as a _him_? Are you on something?"

"I'm not, actually. But I feel great. I feel good about my future and I feel okay about our break-up and I have a star," Adam said, grinning and lowering the phone. Brad was saying something, but it seemed superfluous to talk about Kris, so he hung up instead and pulled the little packet containing the few strands of Kris's hair he'd cut off that morning out of his pocket.

The consistency felt strange in his hand. He moved his fingers over the cloth, and it felt like there was some kind of thin sand inside—dust. Silver dust, he saw when he lifted one of the corners of the cloth. That was supposed to be _hair_, and it had turned into dust. Star dust.

Of course it had.

"Shit," he said to himself. There had to be a way—this couldn't be all that Kris was in this world. There had to be a way to bring him here without disintegrating his body. Maybe it was just dead cells that turned to dust. Maybe someone in Faerie could help him.

It was too late to lose Kris now.

Adam took a deep breath and ran most of the way back to the wall.

*

That had been a little stupid, Adam realized, standing near the entrance door to the Magpie and catching his breath. Kris had never seen the wall, not from a position anchored in the ground, and it would never have crossed his mind to run after Adam, or even run out of Faerie—no easier way to lose each other than that, and Kris wasn't a child who needed constant attention. Adam didn't even want to think about how much older than a child Kris was.

He stepped through the door, narrowly dodging the sharp claws of the cat somebody was holding over their forearm. The foyer at the inn was busy with lodgers lunching with their luggage at their feet, ready to check out and go home. Kris had no luggage, but a quick look around showed no signs of his presence either. Not a surprise—even if he'd mostly gotten over the schedule changes from his life as a star, Kris was nowhere near used to rising with the sun, so Adam took the stairs to the room they'd occupied the night before with the confidence that Kris would be there.

The only person in the room when he got there was, however, the inn manager, who was taking a moment to revamp their guest book by pointing at it with her ears.

"Hi," Adam said, and the manager turned around and immediately smiled at him. She was wearing a golden necklace with letter pendants that spelled out her name: Alexis. "Is Kris around here somewhere?"

"He left this morning with one of the merchants' slaves and our night-shift chef, Danny," Alexis said. "I don't think you know him."

"They didn't leave any notes?"

"They seemed to be in a bit of a hurry," Alexis said. She pursed her lips. "The girl was really antsy. Fidgety. I think she needed help, but—I mean, this is obviously not my business except for how I'm supposed to keep all customers at the very least content, but all the while she was saying she needed Kris to go somewhere with her, I couldn't really read it in her face. Which is odd, because I've seen her before and she's a very expressive young lady."

"Shit. Fuck," Adam said, running a hand over his forehead.

Alexis frowned, tilting her head from one side to the other, lips changing shapes as though she was trying to figure out what he was talking about that way. Then, she gave up and asked, "What is it?"

"That slave—she had bright red hair, didn't she?" Alexis nodded, still looking confused, and Adam went on, "I'm nearly sure her master wants to kill Kris."

Alexis's eyes widened, and she asked, slow and calm, "Why?"

"I've made the mistake of telling people that before," Adam said.

"I've made the mistake of listening to Danny's life plans when he's finished off a few too many glasses of assorted alcoholic beverages while cooking," Alexis said. "It might actually help this time."

"Help how?"

"He's been talking about acquiring something valuable and presenting it to the king in exchange for the princess's hand," Alexis explained. "I don't think he realizes the princess just isn't interested. What does Kris have that he could want?" Adam hesitated to tell her, so she added, "There are three possibilities here: either he's a star, he secretly owns something really important or has a hand in politics in a rival land, or he's a shapeshifting unicorn."

"Well," Adam said, and shrugged in confirmation. Vague, but not too vague. Maybe she'd help in any of those cases and he wouldn't have to reveal Kris's nature this time.

"Cool," Alexis said, quick and serious. "I'm guessing from the silver dust streaked along your thigh, it's the first one. I know where they've gone. I can take you there."

"Seriously?"

"Yes," Alexis said. "I'm not—I've never met any stars, but my species is not without its exploitable perks. I know what it's like to—I let him go. I'd feel terrible if something happened to him now."

*

Alexis's idea of taking him where Kris was involved riding a _horse_.

Adam was so not fit for riding a horse.

"I've never ridden a horse in my life," Adam said.

Alexis gave him a patronizing look and said, "All right. Follow my lead," and climbed on.

*

It wasn't the most comfortable or efficient journey Adam had had in his life, but riding a horse kind of beat touring on a bus. It didn't have much room for personal belongings, plus Adam wouldn't inflict that kind of weight upon an innocent horse with any sort of consistency, but it was freeing—the soft wind felt like waking up, and the regular gallop was something between soothing and exhilarating.

He couldn't really make the most of the calming effects when Kris could easily be about to get literally gutted, but the euphoria was energizing, and Adam was sure he could use that to his advantage.

Alexis's horse slowed down as they neared a very, very old house; Adam wasn't sure how it could possibly be still standing, but he figured it managed with the aid of magic, and that right there was a disturbing conclusion to reach. Fortunately, there was no time to dwell on it.

"That's the place," Alexis said, the horse now trotting lightly and silently down the dusty path leading up to the entrance. "Want me to go in with you? I've never had the chance to kick some deserving ass."

"If you want to," Adam said. She'd offered. "I mean, this witch is really powerful. I've seen her kill someone."

"You saw her kill somebody and you still thought she was a good person?"

Adam shrugged. "She killed somebody who'd been holding a dagger to Kris's chest five minutes earlier, so I was actually pretty grateful to her for that."

"Well," Alexis said, turning the horse around once they reached the door. "Let's do this. Climb down."

They both did, and the horse kicked the door open.

*

Adam absorbed the scene piece by piece.

Firstly, the interior of the house looked much like an empty warehouse designed by someone who thought people would actually stop to marvel at his work. The columns holding up the building were carved with portraits of various mythological creatures, and the windows were so beautiful Adam made a note to get something like them whenever he had a huge mansion where something like them _fit_.

Then, there were cages lined up along the wall to his right, filled with different animals, some of which Adam didn't even recognize. There were squirrels near the end of the line, deepest into the room, and in the cage closest to the entrance, there was a baby lion. A few cages over, Allison was kneeling down by a ferret. She looked helpless and angry and like she wasn't sure what she was doing there, and when she looked up at Adam, her eyes lit up like a smile—not happy, exactly, but hopeful. He nodded minutely at her, in acknowledgment, and looked away.

The place as a whole was large and empty, only one room with a large staircase leading up to a platform opposite the door Adam had walked in through.

On that platform, slightly hidden from view by a neglected balustrade, was a sacrificing table.

By the sacrificing table, Kara held a curved knife in her hand.

_On_ the sacrificing table, restrained and cuffed to the sides, was Kris.

Adam hadn't really come up with a plan before getting here. He had his sword—he remembered how to use his sword, or at least he hoped he wouldn't blank out, but nerves had never paralyzed him, and he had experience not flubbing his lines when it was most important that he didn't, so he was confident in that regard—and he had a vague idea that Kara wasn't crazy. Selfish and cold-hearted, maybe, but she wasn't evil. He might be able to make something of that. He didn't want any more blood in his hands.

He drew his sword out, holding it by his thigh, and stepped right into where Kara could see. There was a huge chandelier overhead, he noticed, and he prayed, a little deliriously, that it wouldn't come loose and crush him. If he had to sustain any injuries or, like, a set of fatal wounds, karma definitely owed him one not caused by a cartoon cliché.

Kara looked down at him and slid the knife down a sheath hanging from her belt before setting her hands on her hips.

"You're kidding me," she said, deadpan.

"Could say the same thing about you," Adam said, though what Kara was doing didn't qualify so much as an innocuous joke as it did as a betrayal of trust and a fucking crime against so many things Adam couldn't even list them. "You _helped_ me. You fucking led me to believe you were on my side, and all along you were just trying to get to Kris?"

Kara crinkled her mouth and offered a one-shouldered shrug, saying, "In a nutshell, yes."

"I can't believe you wanted the star," Adam said. He was _good_ at reading people. He knew who to trust. He thought Kara was one of those people, a good heart within a coolish, unattached exterior, and it was really difficult to accept he'd been wrong.

"Of course I wanted the star, sweetheart. Do you have any idea how much some people are willing to pay for just a piece of a star's heart?" Kara said. "I just wanted it tender and glowing. I knew you'd make it happier than I would. It was an investment. You understand investments, right? Isn't that why you're here? A trip in exchange for a chance at love. So very darling of you."

His eyes shifted down. His journey through Faerie had been a chance at love in itself, and now that love was tied to a fucking sacrificing table.

He lifted his sword out and pointed it at Kara. "Come down here, _sweetheart_. I'll fight you for him."

Kara just smirked, a lopsided smile that he hadn't expected, like she found all of this an exciting development rather than the effort to thwart her plans it truly was, and said, "I'd love to see you try," as she made her way down the staircase. "It will make that heart feel hard-earned. Unfortunately, I'm afraid your early demise will put a damper on the remainder of his hopes and dreams, but nothing I can't work around."

It was enough to bring Adam from restrainedly anxious to angry as fuck.

He took a deep breath through his nose, pressing his lips together in a thin, hard line, and walked forward. If he was doing this, if he was going to pretend to be some kind of hero, he was doing it head on. The situation itself was his cue.

He met her halfway, on the last few bottom steps, and swung for her arm.

This was surreal. Captain Rounds had trained him for situations like this, but Adam hadn't expected ever to get into one, and now he was—getting distracted from really important, life-or-death matters by thinking about the unusualness of them.

He threw himself on the floor to dodge Kara's sword, and barely but surely fended her off until he was once again standing.

"Somebody get him out!" Adam said, and Kara let out an amused, piercing laugh—a distraction Adam used to go for and get her leg to rip open a fraction, the skirt of her long ritual dress soaking in blood. "Alexis!"

The next hit came flat on his arm, luckily harmlessly painful, and still not as painful as realizing Alexis wasn't moving—she was shaking her head and he didn't understand why she couldn't just go up there and untie Kris and get him someplace safe until a thread of voice said, "I have the keys."

His sword was holding Kara's off overhead, and they both paused to glance at Allison—suddenly Adam was thankful for all those painful, boring, silent hours Captain Rounds had spent making sure he was able to notice every slide and motion made by or to his sword without physically looking at it.

"Well, then fucking _do_ something!" Adam said, rougher than he'd intended, but she'd helped him before. She had to be able to help now. He needed her to help him.

"I can't work against her!" Allison yelled, voice ripping through the room.

"Damn right," Kara said, and slid her sword back to resume their spat. "You know it belongs to me," she told Adam, shouting over the metallic back and forth of their weapons.

"Nobody belongs to anybody," Adam said. "He's not yours. He's not a body for you to rip out the heart and throw in a ditch somewhere."

"That's for me to decide, isn't it?" Kara said sweetly. "I bet if you asked it, it would say it's yours. But it's not yours. I gave you that candle. That candle was worth so much more than a temporary tracking spell."

"That's what you sold it for," Adam said. "It's a contract. I paid my part. You're holding absolutely fucking _nothing_ over my head and I don't owe you a fucking thing."

"I saved your _life_. Which, for some reason I can't fathom, you're choosing to risk _again_. I saved your life, and I saved his, and this is my reward. The star is my reward. Its heart is my reward."

There was hardly a point in rebutting an argument when the argument holder had every reason not to give in, so Adam continued putting his swashbuckling lessons to good use and yelling encouragement at Allison, who was trying hard to stand—it seemed Kara didn't want her even to have a chance at getting close to Kris, and Adam didn't know why he was surprised. He'd watched Kara toy with Paula, watched her talk down to Allison, watched her realize things Adam could barely begin to comprehend. Kara wasn't an idiot, and she was skilled at her craft, and it fucking sucked that she was, but he wouldn't get anywhere if he underestimated her.

As soon as he stopped doing that, he found himself taking over the advantage, getting Kara into bending and contorting motions to dodge his hits, and then, when she barely had enough balance to keep from falling to her knees, ridding her of her sword, which went flying through the air and into one of the cages near Allison, nearly slashing through the tail of an oversized vole.

He seized Kara, then, gripping her wrists together between her back and his stomach, and turned to face someone else.

"Allison," he pleaded, careful.

"I can't do it," Allison said again. "I just can't. I'm sorry."

"You need to look under the surface," Adam said. It hurt to speak when you were holding a sword to someone's throat. The tension in his muscles was excruciating, and every time he felt he might lose it was terrifying.

"What surface?"

"I don't know—your life! The way you feel about all of this, the whole caravan thing—"

"I have!" Allison said. "It's just roots and dirt."

Adam shook his head fractionally in disbelief. "Are you always this literal?"

"I'm not liter—"

"Wait," Alexis said.

"Oh, now pixie girl wants in on the fun," Kara said. It would have been annoying if her voice didn't sound strangled, tied down and terrified.

Nothing much happened as they stared at Alexis—or several things did, only they weren't instantly perceptible, and Adam only took note of them when he got the big picture. Alexis's ears morphed into a sharper triangular shape than they'd been before, her skin hardened and paled, and her hair seemed to shorten and shift to a gleaming shade of silver, pink streaks turning purple and locks framing her ears and her chin.

"Allison, look at me," Alexis said, and it struck both of them that her voice sounded different—deep and tinny at the same time, a sound that immediately caught your attention—and it had caught Allison's. "Allison, you need to get up there, and get Kris off that table. You need to do it. This is not your job. This is not Kara's job. This is his life, and Adam's life, and your life. It's not your job to let Kara take them."

"I can't—" Allison tried, eyes glistening, holding back tears. She bit her lip until it soothed her enough to say again, "I can't—"

"But you _can_," Alexis said, and, with a blink of her eyes, her eyelashes took up the purple hue of her streaks. With another blink, the collar of her dress unraveled off her neck and leapt into the air, her eyes firmly on it as it made its way towards Allison.

It regained its shape around Allison's neck, and Adam could distinctly perceive the way her throat became less tense and her mouth opened to take in air, gaspily inhaling as though she'd been drowning.

"You can do it," Alexis said again, softly, looking in Allison's eyes, and Allison finally, finally found the strength in her arms to lift herself to her feet and the coordination in her legs to make her way across the room in a series of leaps, past Alexis and Adam and Kara and every last step leading up to the sacrificing table and Kris.

It gave her surprisingly very little trouble to get Kris out of his clasps and ropes, and soon Adam could see his face as he sat up and off the table, pale from fear, but still alive.

"That's _my_ star!" Kara yelled, and, in a determined, calmer voice, "Put it back. _Now_."

"Stop calling him 'it,'" said Adam. He was feeling kind of cocky now—he was holding the possibility of death over Kara, heavy against her neck, and Alexis was channelling the creeping plants stationed outside and over the large picture windows into tight ropes to hold Kara's wrists and feet and shoulders securely in place.

"Actually, I'm not really that bothered about pronouns right now," Kris chimed in, making his way down the stairs shakily, holding onto Allison's arm.

"Really?"

"_Actually_," Alexis said, "I think you can talk about that later, don't you?"

"_Put it back_," Kara said again, staring into Allison's face.

Experimentally, Allison shook her head. Then she shook it again. "No," she said. "No. I'm not going to."

Alexis reached out to squeeze her, and Adam smiled at her in the best way he knew how to show how proud of her he was, because, even though he barely knew her, he really was proud of her. She'd done an admirable thing.

"And now," he said, looking down at her, "we deal with this," and flattened the blade against Kara's neck.

He could—he could do this. If he had to, he would.

"Please," Kara said, finally snapping out of her power trance. "You've got it—him, you've got him. I won't try to capture him again. Ever. Just let me go." Adam could hear her breathe in the silence that followed, little intakes of air that sounded scared and anxious and that made him satisfied at the same time as horribly guilty. "_Please_. My life doesn't hang on his. It will do me no harm to let go of wanting to possess a heart. I'll walk away. I have no good reason not to."

If he felt guilty for making her anxious, it would wreck him to kill her. He couldn't do that. He didn't have it in him to take somebody's life if there was a better option—one where the only blood shed would be the blood that already had been.

"Those enchanted chains," Adam said suddenly. It dawned on him that Kara was a merchant—that she knew things he could use. "They work out there; I've seen them. Hell, I've used them."

"So what?" Kara said.

"How do they work? How do you translate that kind of magic into the real world?"

Kara watched him warily, frowning, and then her face broke into a resigned smile. "Oh, you found out about the stardust? Ouch. Little-known fact about stars," she teased chirpily, and Adam squeezed her side hard. She'd almost killed Kris. She had no right to dismiss him.

Adam looked at Kris—he couldn't read his face, for once, but he seemed to know what Kara was talking about, like he'd forgotten before, not thought about it, and wasn't sure how to feel now that it actually mattered.

Kara remained silent for a long moment. Adam waited, because maybe it was complicated, maybe she needed to think about it to give a proper explanation—but it didn't come, so Adam released her ribs and drew his hand under the edge of his sword, dragging his thumb over her pulse point and spreading his fingers around the bottom of her neck.

He pressed down softly, slowly, and, before he could make a proper attempt at depriving her of oxygen, Kara choked out, "Lightning. Lightning."

"Would it work on a living creature?"

"How should I know, I've never tried," Kara said, and Adam kicked her in the ankle. "_Yes_. Yes. Probably. It's worth a try!"

"Will it hurt him if it doesn't work?" Adam added.

Kara shook her head minimally—he'd loosened his sword and hold, the vines keeping Kara up in place instead, but it was still dangerous for her to move any more than that.

"Talk me through it and I'll spare your life," Adam said, and let go of her, watched as Alexis tightened the ropes and made them drag Kara towards the source of the plant, pinning her against the wall near the window it crept in through. By the end, Kara was plastered to the wall by leaves and stems and standing between two cages, each one containing a small boar, both of them taking turns between cowering and growling at her feet.

"You need the star," Kara said, sobering up, sounding like this was a bargain end she could absolutely hold, which was both relieving and nerve-racking, "and you need lightning. And you need gloves if you're going to do it to him yourself, or you'll burn your hands to smithereens. The lightning courses through the item for a while—can take anything from a second to two hours, and it's impossible to determine until the process begins—and it reinforces its physical form. A star is largely a magically constructed creature—it's life and stardust and a magical heart, and all of those things can exist in your world, but its human form is an illusion."

Adam took it all in—this was doable. He had the lightning Captain Rounds had given him as a gift at the end of the journey on her ship, and he had Kris, and he wanted to go back home. With him.

"Answer honestly," he said, lastly, and, at Kara's nod, "should I do it?"

"Well, that's a priority issue. I can't decide for you. All I can tell you is I've never seen this done to a star before. It could fail. It could hurt. The upside is, he's a star. He can make the process faster and less painful by shining, by absorbing the lightning into its—his own natural glow."

"Do you want to do it?" Adam asked, turning his gaze away from Kara and onto Kris.

There was a long pause in which Adam thought he'd say no—this was where he belonged, the second best place for him after the sky, and it was selfish of Adam to want to take Kris with him into his world—he'd never even offered to stay in Faerie himself.

"You don't have to do it," he said, just as Kris was saying, "Yes," and walking determinedly towards him.

"Now?" Kara said, struggling against the plant.

"Why not?" said Kris. He reached around Adam's back for the cylinder of lightning he was carrying, and propped himself up on his toes to kiss Adam.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah," Kris said against his mouth. "This is like all those myths your world has about angels falling—losing their wings. I fell. I'm not a star anymore. All I have left from that life is my memories." Kris laughed, a rough sound that struggled to get through his throat. "Well, my memories and my heart. But I've already given my heart to you."

"That is so fucking cheesy," Adam said, grinning from ear to ear. "And I love it."

Kris began glowing, Adam realized, shining more and more strongly as they kissed, and Adam felt the relief and joy long after Kris had stepped aside with the lightning, releasing as much into his body as it was able to take.

Adam waited.

*

They left Kara inside, attached to the wall—Alexis assured him Danny would come back to rescue her as soon as he thought the ritual was over—and Allison drove them back to the market in Kara's caravan.

"Do I have to give it back?" Allison asked of Alexis's dress collar, pouting.

Alexis laughed. "You can keep it," she said, and, in a conspiratorial tone, "but you should know there's no magic in it. It was all make-believe. You cheated Kara's spell yourself."

"I did?" Allison said, eyes wide, face slowly turning from shock to confidence. "I did. Sweet."

"I'm not keeping this," she said after a few minutes of silence, like she'd been mulling it over in her head. "The van. I'm free from it now. She can take this thing. I want nothing to do with it."

"There's going to be an opening at the Magpie after I get Danny fired," Alexis offered. "I can't give you his post, but we'll be promoting someone to it, so you could probably take that spot. You can shop, right? It'd be a start."

"I can shop," Allison said, and nodded with confidence.

*

The day resumed and went by uneventfully, spent gathering the few possessions Adam had accumulated over the previous weeks into complimentary pieces of luggage Megan—on behalf of the Spellbound Magpie Inn, via a chain of gossip Adam imagined had had Katy as an intermediary between Alexis and Megan herself—had offered them after the whole situation with one of her employees kidnapping a guest and not coming back to take responsibility for his actions.

As it was, there was hardly even any point in placing blame for the little things, particularly having everybody come out of it unscathed. Still, Adam knew the spell Kara had cast on his messenger bag wouldn't work once he stepped into Le Mur, and there were more than a few things he wanted to take home that wouldn't fit in its normal capacity.

Dinner that night went down much more pleasantly than any of the food Adam had consumed in a pretty damned long time, and he allowed himself some excess—nothing urgent was nagging at him, now, which marked a big difference in his appetite. It was worth indulging.

He glanced around the table at Kris as often as he could, and more often than not found him glancing back, with a soft, matte glow illuminating his skin, strengthening just slightly when he let his smile reach his eyes.

It was the glowing, Adam thought, that made him believe the lightning had served its purpose: it was still present, but it was a starry-eyedness kind of thing, fading in and out intermittently and so much more subtly than it had been either of the nights he hadn't expected Adam to kiss him. It hit Adam how much he'd miss that when they were home, though it wasn't at all a certain thing it wouldn't survive the move. If shining was part of being a star, and the lightning had only reinforced that essence, it could easily follow them out of Le Mur. It ultimately didn't matter anyway, not on any kind of important level.

It'd probably be a better idea to wish for it to be lost, Adam realized, if they didn't want paranormal astronomy nuts harassing them, which Adam so did not. But he loved that glow—it calmed his neuroses, and he wished people were like that, so easy to read. A kind of self-doubt vanished with an ability to tell for sure if someone was pleased and happy, or not at all, or not entirely.

"So we're going home tomorrow?" Kris said, wiping his face with a towel as he walked into his room. There were fine hairs glimmering on the back of his wrists. "Los Angeles?"

That was—home, yes, in a way Adam had never really believed before. That was where he was himself as fully and openly as he could be—where he'd first felt comfortable being that person—but Kris knew that. This was a sort of idle talk—it started sounding like it, but there was always some untouched thing the conversation ended up veering into. Adam was almost sure Kris didn't even realize how good he was at drawing topics out of cobwebbed, long-forgotten drawers, or just calling to mind silly little things that hadn't been mentioned before: reminders, small concerns, reassurance.

"Are you familiar with it?" Adam asked, curious, as he got into bed.

"Never been there. Think I'll know my way around, though."

Adam laughed. "Walking compass."

"Just a star," Kris said, smiling. "Still that, apparently. I still remember everything. Realm of possibility says I could meet a few hundred people I know everything about who know absolutely nothing about me. It's fascinating." Kris frowned. "And kind of terrifying, but I'm hoping I'll be able to tell whether I know something because I _do_ or because someone involved had a chance to let me know about it, you know, personally."

"Or maybe," Adam began, careful, "maybe—do you think you might forget those things? Not—you'll remember your life before falling, I'm completely sure you will, but it seems like a fair trade—if there are things you know that give you an advantage over everyone else, you could remember knowing them but not actually know them."

"Thought of that," Kris said. "Haven't discarded it yet. And you're right it would be fair."

"You scared about going out there?" said Adam. "It's an okay world. I mean, you know that. Little crazy sometimes, but it's mostly a good place to be."

"No, I'm—I want to go. It's easier. It's interesting. It's good for both of us, and, besides, I'm—I'm with you. Just going through one of those pesky identity things. And I'm not sure I've absorbed the lightning completely yet, and even if I have, or when I do, I won't know everything that's changed about me at once."

"Well," Adam said, "there's a reason that's not how journeys work."

"Yeah?"

Adam smiled against Kris's neck, burrowing his head and kissing that spot over his collarbone that made him sigh. "They wouldn't be worth plowing through otherwise," he said. "I just hope I can actually take you out there."

***

 

**EPILOGUE**

Six Months Later

Captain Rounds was a godsend.

"Or, I don't know," Adam said, leaving his keys on the table by the door and following the scent of Thai takeout into the small living room, "a starsend." That made more sense. "I'm assured of this."

"Sorry to disappoint," Kris said from the floor by the armchair, "but I'm neither omniscient nor omnipotent. This hypothesis of yours would require me to be both."

"I am assured of this," Adam repeated, and fell back on the couch. "Totally fucking assured of this. If it wasn't really insensitive to say it considering her history, I'd seriously question her decision to leave the state and move into a flying ship."

"You know," Kris said, furrowing his brows, "I can't remember that."

"Her leaving L.A.?"

"Her story."

Adam narrowed his eyes—sometimes Kris said stuff like that, and he never meant anything by it other than _this is, I want you to know it_, but it felt wrong to dismiss the things he said like they didn't matter. He was getting the hang of it, slowly; he said, "Well, I'm taking that secret to the grave."

"Are you taking today's reason to idolize her to the grave, too?" Kris asked, handing him a couple of food containers.

"Just thankful." Adam grabbed some plastic cutlery from the coffee table and dug in. He felt famished.

"For her existence?" said Kris, a glimmery smile dancing in his eyes.

"In this particular case, for her old network," Adam said, "not that I can't simultaneously appreciate the fact that she exists, because obviously I do."

"Obviously," Kris echoed, mocking.

"I got a couple of calls today," said Adam, "sat in a couple of meetings. About the demos I recorded a couple of months ago? One of these guys saw me perform last week and he _loved_ it, so—I don't want to jinx it, but there's interest, and that's actually a hell of a lot more than I've ever gotten before, so. Fingers crossed."

Kris made a show of crossing his greasy fingers up over his head, even though Adam was pretty sure this was one of those things Kris looked down—for a fairly harmless and respectful meaning of the word—on human beings for believing it made a difference.

They were actually pretty different people, so different Adam didn't think they would've stuck around each other had circumstances not made it unavoidable. Kris was pragmatic and homey and not very starlike at all, not the way Adam saw that quality, though there was still that glow to him, barely perceptible but present, and there was also the ease with which he was able to channel Adam's artistic vision into readable sheet music. Adam had known they weren't all that similar before offering him a place to stay without even stopping to negotiate the timeframe of this cohabitation or putting any pressure on Kris about rent. Kris had come through anyway, begun to chime in early on, as soon as a few smart souls saw his qualificationless value as a sessions guy, and then more as soon as he'd taken enough piano lessons to combine his natural gift for it with the theoretical knowledge necessary to teach some of his own.

In a way, Adam felt their time in Faerie had been a crash course in putting up with each other in enclosed spaces, no matter how much they hated each other at a given time, and they never did, now, which made everything a lot easier.

It hadn't been strictly smooth sailing, but it had all just _happened_, and overall it had worked out great, and there was that awesome feeling of knowing Kris was there because he'd wanted to, because he wanted to be, and every time Kris gave him a long, coy look, or lost himself in a hug, or turned away from cooking breakfast to kiss him good morning, or even called in to say he was running late—every one of those times, Adam couldn't help marveling at the way Kris had just fit into his life and fit into, _shaped_ his idea of a relationship he'd like to find himself in.

Then again, before Kris, that ideal had been everything—Adam had wanted it so badly he'd kept trying to mold people into an abstract, impossible concept. Kris, on the other hand, wasn't an ideal concept at all: Kris was Kris, and real, and not always right for Adam.

Kris had found him, and held on.

**END**


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